Vigil for Peace in Yemen, a New Norm

by Kathy Kelly
March 27, 2020

 

For the past three years, several dozen New Yorkers have gathered each Saturday at Union Square, at 11:00 a.m. to vigil for peace in Yemen.

Now, however, due to the coronavirus, the vigil for peace is radically altered. Last week, in recognition of the city’s coming shelter in place program, participants were asked to hold individual vigils at their respective homes on the subsequent Saturday mornings. Normally, during the public vigils, one or more participants would provide updates on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the ongoing war, and U.S. complicity. As COVID-19 threatens to engulf war-torn Yemen, it is even more critical to raise awareness of how the war debilitates the country.

If the vigil for peace were to gather in Union Square this Saturday, activists most certainly would draw attention to how Turkish officials  indicted 20 Saudi nationals for the murder of the dissident writer, Jamal Khashoggi. Turkey’s investigation of the murder and dismemberment of Mr. Khashoggi indicts 18 people for committing the murder and names two officials for incitement to murder. One of them, General Ahmad Al-Asiri, a close associate of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was deputy chief of intelligence when Mr. Khashoggi was murdered.

Numerous news reports over the past five years establish a pattern of Mr. Al-Asiri responding to inquiries about Saudi-led coalition military attacks against Yemen civilians with misleading statements, outright denials and attempted cover-ups.

For example, On August 30th, 2015, according to Human Rights Watch, a Saudi coalition led airstrike attacked the Al-Sham Water Bottling Factory in the outskirts of Abs, in northern Yemen. The strike destroyed the factory and killed 14 workers, including three boys, and wounded 11 more.

Later on August 30, after the airstrike, Gen. Al-Asiri told Reuters that the plant was not a bottling factory, but rather a place where Houthis made explosive devices. However, all of the individuals Human Rights Watch interviewed concurred:

…that plant was being used to bottle water and was not used for any military purposes… A group of international journalists traveled to the site of the blast two days after it was hit and reported that they could not find evidence of any military targets in the area. They said that they carefully examined the site, and took photos and videos of piles of scorched plastic bottles melted together from the heat of the explosion. They could not find any evidence that the factory was being used for military purposes.

Meanwhile, Yemenis were desperately trying to contend with rising cases of cholera caused by shortages of clean water.

In October, 2015, when eyewitnesses declared a hospital in northern Yemen run by Doctors Without Borders was destroyed by Saudi-led coalition warplanes, Gen. Al-Asiri told Reuters coalition jets had been in action over Saada governorate but had not hit the hospital.

On August 15, 2016,  a Saudi-led bombing campaign again targeted a hospital in northern Yemen supported by Doctors Without Borders. 19 people were killed.

The Abs hospital was bombed two days after Saudi airstrikes attacked a school in northern Yemen, killing ten students and wounding dozens more.

Yet Saudi officials continued to insist they struck military targets only. Commenting on the August 13 school attack, Gen. Al-Asiri said the dead children were evidence the Houthis were recruiting children as guards and fighters.

“We would have hoped,” General Al-Asiri said, that Doctors Without Borders “would take measures to stop the recruitment of children to fight in wars instead of crying over them in the media.”

In one of the deadliest attacks of the war, on October 8, 2016, the Saudi-led military coalition’s fighter jets repeatedly bombed a hall filled with mourners during a funeral for an official in the capital city of Sana. At least 140 people were killed and 550 more were wounded.

General Al-Asiri, still a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, suggested there were other causes for the blast and later reported the coalition had not carried out any strikes near the hall. But outraged U.N. officials, backed up by videos on social media, insisted that airstrikes had massacred the mourners.

The United States has steadily sided with Saudi Arabia, including supplying it with weapons, training its armed forces and covering for it in the U.N. Security Council. But “Defense One,” a U.S. news agency intending to provide news and analysis for national security leaders and stakeholders, recently issued a stinging rebuke to the Kingdom’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. They denounced the “humanitarian abomination ushered by Riyadh’s war in Yemen,” and called his leadership “as destabilizing to the Middle East as its Iranian rival.” Defense One urged Washington to discontinue enabling “Riyadh’s most reckless behavior.”

Turkey’s indictment of 20 Saudi nationals for murder and their insistence that Mr. Al-Asiri bears responsibility may help move the court of public opinion to resist all support for the Kingdom’s ongoing war in Yemen.

Particularly now, with intense focus on U.S. health care, it’s timely to recognize that in the past five years U.S. supported Gulf Coalition airstrikes bombed Yemen’s health care facilities 83 times. As parents here care for children during school closures, they should be reminded that since December 13, 2018, eight Yemeni children have been killed or injured every single day. Most of the children killed were playing outdoors with their friends or were on their way to or from school. According to the Yemen Data Project, more than 18,400 civilians have been killed or injured by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies since the initial  bombing campaign in 2015.

U.S. national security leaders and stakeholders in war, as they shelter in place, have an extraordinary opportunity to set a new norm and link with the vigil for Peace in Yemen, virtually. And, some may even join Yale students on April 9, from sunrise to sunset, in their National Fast for Peace in Yemen. They invite us to pledge support for Doctors Without Borders and other relief groups in Yemen.

Photo credit: Bill Ofenloch: Activists practice “physical distancing” at a Saturday morning vigil for Peace in Yemen, Union Square, NYC

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)

Working People Have No Country

by Matt Stannard
January 3, 2020

Try this early and often–in every conversation about the administration’s war-drive against Iran, every discussion online and offline. Say:

“You and I have more in common with an Iraqi or Iranian militia grunt than with Donald Trump.”

. . . and simply: “Working people have no country.”

If your concern is beating this administration, and thus restoring the legitimacy of things like U.S. military hegemony, then this strategy and this blog aren’t for you. If your concern is to use the present political moment as an opportunity to strike at one of the root causes of this administration’s existence, the kind of world where mobbed up landlords become world leaders, then understanding our commonalities with Iranians is more than just liberal cosmopolitanism.

The warrant for “working people have no country” as an anti-war slogan is that if we see ourselves as beings in a common material class, and have adopted cooperative economic praxis, it won’t make sense to go to war with one another–at least where the interests of the majority are concerned.

There’s a large body of work on this, and it would be counterproductive for me to recommend that one read too much of it before diving right into direct political engagement. In reviewing the topic, I wanted to center on a singular explanatory text, and not necessarily a “Marxist” one, explaining why Marx and Engels were concerned that working people struggling for socialism or communism would center the ruling class in their own countries as the first oppositional force needing overthrow, and would view the working class as an international class.

So I tracked down Evan Luard’s Basic Texts in International Relations, in which Luard devotes an informative overview, “Class Consciousness as a Restraint on War” to the issue of why shared working class consciousness rejects war between states.

Part of the working class’s motivation for rejecting their own governments’ war drives is that the aspiration of working class political power includes eliminating those drives. “Once they had acquired power,” Luard puts it, “they would cease to have any interest in a war against any other state where the people had taken power. War would then, like the state itself, wither away.” Wither away because “the state” is based on antagonisms, war is a flare-up of such antagonisms. Luard points out that 50 years after the Manifesto Karl Kautsky, in a more utopian tone, wrote that workers would recognize the interdependence of their needs and the common conditions of their existence. In one form or another, most socialists adhere to that belief.

But I think it’s obvious, and probably necessary, to point out that we don’t need to view these beliefs as subscriptions to inexorable, mystical axioms. There might still be conflict. There might still be bloodshed. You can think this because you think humans are just inherently that way, or you can predict that the antagonisms of previous orders take a long time to exorcise and may never completely go away, or whatever. You don’t have to accept these premises as anything other than general prediction of tendencies. And you don’t have to believe that overcoming class will cause all other differences to be erased, synthesized, dissipated, or otherwise minimized. You can simply believe, as more and more people do, that capitalism and material hierarchy make it much, much harder to solve the conflicts that accompany those differences and conditions.

Class politics– emphasizing our shared materiality and shared security needs, using that shared materiality as a way of faithfully and vulnerably working through and dwelling in our other differences–can inform our anti-war politics, and connect our opposition to war to our larger ecological and economic justice agenda.

And, in many ways, most of us already recognize that our ethical obligations to each other transcend national origin. If the breakdown of such consciousness today can be discerned by opposition to the current administration’s actually existing fascism on immigration. Granted, it’s not a magic 8-ball on working class internationalism, but most Americans want more immigration and diversity, not less. Recently, political researcher Stanley Greenburg described how this administration has hastened the crystalization of such attitudes:

Pew asked whether immigrants “strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents” or “are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care.” The proportion embracing immigration jumped from 53% in 2015 to 62% this year. Trump sent troops to the border, warned of an America exposed without a wall and ran ads showing illegal immigrants who murdered innocent Americans, and yes, he made immigration the most important reason to vote against the Democrats in the off-year elections. His party lost the House in a 53%-45% landslide last year and has lost the battle of public opinion on immigration by much more than that.

This is an example of the various accelerations we currently live, whether we want to admit it or not–and at least some of this consciousness will survive even if trumpism does not. On immigration, as on climate and healthcare and, I ultimately suspect, on warmaking, a large cross section of America is turning sharply socialist, almost leapfrogging over more moderate-liberal analogs, and while it’s not the same as storming the palace, it points to what could turn out to be a massive fucking anti-war movement, assuming the administration treats the current war drive as a traditional war drive.

At least as important as magnitude will be motivation. Mass movements don’t often stop wars from starting, but mass opposition to those wars energizes class politics. We have an opportunity to make the slogan “working people have no country,” and the careful and powerful analysis behind it, central to our argument against this war and all wars, and in so doing, invite more people into socialist politics.

Uttering and explaining the slogan will help win people over. It will cause some other people to yell back “yes we do have countries” and invoke their fatherland myths–and it’s useful to know who those people are too.

Matt Stannard is operations director of Solidarity House Cooperative and produces content on cooperative economics and law.

Obama is wrong: We shouldn’t “chill out” about the primaries

by Yana Ludwig

December 13, 2019

It’s been a couple weeks now, but I’m still thinking about Barack Obama’s request for everyone to “chill out” about differences between presidential candidates. It is just the latest in a long series of “Vote Blue No Matter Who” sentiments to get far more air time than Bernie Sanders record breaking 4 million donations. It’s not only annoying: I believe it is damaging our democracy. 

The better message would be: Vote smart in the primaries because that’s where we are deciding what really matters.

Both major political parties in the US are in epic battles for the souls of their party right now. Many people have deep frustrations with being told to be loyal to a party whose current leadership simply doesn’t share our values. It feels for many like the “choice” we have in November isn’t nearly as much of a choice as we want… or see the world needing. 

It’s easy to see that from the left, in part because only a thin slice of those currently holding office share our most core beliefs. We can see that the line should be drawn, not along formal party lines, but along economic analysis lines: not between Democrats and Republicans, but between neoliberal capitalism (AKA business as usual in the US) and eco-socialism (of which Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s version of the Green New Deal is our closest example in national political dialogue right now). 

Neoliberal capitalism is maintains that everything should be privatized and that access to those private goods and services should be determined by your ability to compete well enough in a dog eat dog economy. It’s a “good fight” writ cruel and petty. Neoliberals are enthusiastic about everything from education and spirituality to technology and entertainment to (formerly) public lands and insulin all coming with price tags that only some can pay. 

Neoliberalism is built-in means testing for everything we need to survive. Poor people are consistently judged unworthy, complete with implied moral failings, because to be a successful economic producer is the primary indicator of being a good person. Except most of us are failing, and that should tell us more about the test itself than the people being tested.

Among neoliberalism’s tools that spill into politics is the practice of attaching status to your ability to acquire things. Both parties seem to crave wealthy people’s approval, attention and resources, and it is a rare candidate who resists this in a genuine way and centers their attention and policy proposals firmly on the masses.

Socialists resist the whole neoliberal paradigm. Socialism is about democratizing the economy; giving everyone not just “access” (which has become the buzzword among neoliberals who want to appear more left than they actually are on healthcare) but an economy structured around workers actually deriving full benefit from their own labor. It says that a public sector is good, not because of some excessive love of “big government” but because when we take cut-throat profiteering out of the equation, everyone has a genuinely fair shot at getting their needs met.

Socialism says that there should not be whole industries designed to be gatekeepers to Life (because healthcare is a right), Liberty (because freedom from unjust persecution and imprisonment is a right) and the Pursuit of Happiness (because education is also a right). Neoliberalism is fine with someone making money off of you and your “basic” rights. In that way, it fundamentally undermines those rights to the point that they are no longer basic in truth. Socialism demands that we de-privatize healthcare, the prison system and education (among other things) because without doing that, our American core values are just words on paper.

There was a fascinating recent article about my home, Wyoming, and the internal crackdown happening within the state’s Republican party. The far right has taken over state leadership in the party, rewritten the platform in the Trump’s and Cheney’s ugliest image, and is now punishing county party leadership who are not toeing the line strongly enough. It’s nasty and epic, and reading that article made it clear to me that Republicans are also struggling with what their party is all about. 

Obama is friendlier for sure, but he represents a similarly ugly push to get in line.

It’s important for Republicans right now to be asking if they prefer Trump’s world or, say, Romney’s, just as it is for Democrats to be paying close attention to the differences between a Sanders presidency and a Biden presidency. Unless we have a candidate who is not a neoliberal on the ballot in November, we are ceding critical ground to the economic paradigm that led us to this moment of resurgent fascism in America, and to the climate crisis that threatens us all. 

The differences are that big and that important.

So my exhortation here is simple: Do. Not. Chill. Out. The primaries are like the semi-finals of a national championship, and whether your team makes it to the finals and has a shot at some actual political power matters to the fate of our people and planet. We are writing the story right now. We have not two but four critical, and markedly different, options in front of us. Choose well.

Yana Ludwig is the author of Together Resilient: Building Community in the Age of Climate Disruption, a member of Solidarity Collective and Democratic Socialists of America, and a candidate for U.S. Senate from Wyoming.

The Slog Ahead for New Public Banks in California

100 years ago, socialists in North Dakota quickly created a public bank. Things will unfold more slowly in California.

by Matt Stannard
October 7, 2019

Last week I cautiously celebrated the final passage and signing of AB 857 in California allowing municipalities to apply for public banking charters. I cautioned that there were no guarantees that the California DBO would approve public banks at all and that the process would be political-but-unpoliticized: banking board or licensing commission criteria are ideologically laden and rhetorically de-politicized; in other words, these actors hide their market biases but would accuse public banking advocates of wanting to politicize banks. I had other concerns too, but since that post I’ve learned a few other details, thanks to Marc Armstrong and David Jette generously answering some questions I had.

When I asked David what charter applicants might expect from a private-biased DBO, he suggested that the most prudent initial applicants would specifically focus on fixing city debt, credit to government agencies, and possibly green energy banks.

Fiscal soundness would also be important, he said. In a deeper sense, what this means (and I don’t think anybody seriously denies this) is that the banks will be judged according to the very paradigm of fiscal scarcity that public banking advocates rebuke. Well, reformism isn’t easy. Unlike 1919 North Dakota, Californians haven’t formed an agrarian socialist party and won the governorship and legislature. I appreciate David’s candor. This will be a years-long journey, and it will be challenging to keep public demand steadily humming.

The most important accomplishment of 857 is, as Marc told me in an email, that “the taboo has been broken . . . permission has been given.” Marc told me that several NoCal cities are investigating using JPA (Joint Powers Authority) to create a bank or banks. Large cities will certainly be the first to apply for licenses. Smaller cities will follow suit if the big ones are successful.

From what everyone is telling me, I surmise it will take two years at a minimum before we see a public bank open in the best scenario, and five or more years, again best case, before we see a handful of them.

But this is in the best case scenario, where there aren’t mountains of objections and demands made by private banking interests who want to hold onto the private advantage even for those narrow functions David mentioned. On the subject of bias towards private banks, Bob Bows reminded me this morning that one strong manifestation of this–and a potential legal and policy challenge for municipalities as these banks get off the ground, is the neoliberal doctrines that form the basis of anti-competitiveness challenges under global trade agreements. Recall that the ongoing concern with TPP and other regimes was that public utilities would be attacked and potentially become tribunal targets. I put together several sources’ analysis on this question back in 2015 at the PBI blog. Imagine objections being made in the DBO application process, or after the fact via trade tribunals, that public banks will be able to perform financial services without a profit motive, thereby undermining competition in a sector–the financial sector–that trade-in-services advocates view as their market territory. The public is excluded from most of the negotiations that create these rules, negotiations that will undoubtedly be biased against public ownership as a whole and public financial ownership specifically.

A long-term strategy summit, led by the on-the-ground California public banking organizations and activists at the forefront of poor people’s, divestment, and climate justice movements–the people who made 857 happen–may well already be in the works, and certainly should be, and if that happens I would joyfully live blog it, because to overuse the already overused phrasing, the real work starts now.

I’m operations director at Solidarity House Cooperative. You can read a lot of my articles, including several individual pieces and a longer series on public banking, here at Occupy.

California’s New Public Banking Law: Joy and Cautious Optimism

by Matt Stannard
October 3, 2019

Good news this week: California municipalities may now apply to create public banks.

In my work with the Public Banking Institute, I spent many years writing arguments in favor of the social utility and justice-delivering potential of public banks. As a member of the Commonomics USA team I was fortunate to participate in some of the meetings and workshops that built the agendas and grassroots coalitions that culminated in the successful passage and signing into law of AB 857. More recently, I’ve assisted the Rocky Mountain Public Banking Institute in their education and legal efforts in Colorado. Getting public banking bills on the floor for consideration in the first place had proven next to impossible until this happened in California. Heck, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy campaigned on creating a public bank in the state and now the effort seems tabled. The only other bona fide public bank on U.S. land since the formation of the Bank of North Dakota by a socialist government in 1919 has been in American Samoa, and only via federal fiat, and only because there was an air-tight and purely non-ideological case for it.

So this is a big deal, and the bill’s sponsors have used the language of economic access: “communities and neighborhoods . . . use public dollars for their own public good . . . affordable housing . . . schools and parks . . . accessible loans for students and businesses” in justifying the law, which allows municipalities to apply for banking charters (the law itself doesn’t create or require the creation of any banks).

My own five great years in the thick of the movement were exhausting, and I learned a lot about how good ideas win and lose in political contexts. So I’m cautiously optimistic at the news, even though I take great joy in the movement getting this far. I also have no desire to second-guess the great activists, policy people, and communicators making it happen in California’s here and now. They know more than I do and you should direct your questions to them–and see how you can help, especially if you’re in California, because the battle isn’t over.

Reasons to be optimistic:

1. The law is clearly written to encourage local economic sustainability and push away bigger banks.

“It is the intent of the Legislature,” the Act reads, “that this act authorize the lending of public credit to public banks and authorize public ownership of public banks for the purpose of achieving cost savings, strengthening local economies, supporting community economic development, and addressing infrastructure and housing needs for localities. It is the intent of the Legislature that public banks shall partner with local financial institutions, such as credit unions and local community banks, and shall not compete with local financial institutions.”

So those are goods (and some not-bads) in themselves, steps in the right direction. Although private local bankers can just as likely be greedy little local viceroys as community-minded entrepreneurs or George Bailey-type stewards, local banks generally do better by local folks. It’s incumbent on those communities to demand the best from their local businesses, and a municipal bank can be a tool to do that.  And, of course, credit unions kick ass. They aren’t public banks, but they can do about as well as consumer co-op entities can do in a hierarchical market environment. Public banks will help those entities. And local financing of green energy, worker-owned cooperatives, and nonprofit services could be game changers. The right leaders could make much of these banks.

2. The law sends a message that a public economy, and public finance, exist. Privatized finance isn’t natural or optimal. We can debate about whether private entities can co-exist with public ones (the record of partnership isn’t good), but before we can have that conversation, we need to shift the presumption away from private ownership — particularly of finance. The debate needs to happen on a level, democratic, worker-and-stakeholder-oriented field.

Public banks change the conversation about scarcity and public goods. They inform a new discussion about sustainability and growth. In a sense, public banks do this just by existing. But their successful deployment in an egalitarian and ecologically-positive manner, sooner rather than later, will make California’s victory worth the effort.

Reasons to be cautious:

1. The charter process and other “safeguards” could become poison pills, circumventing or even undermining the success of public banks. The politics of the Commissioner of Business Oversight just became very, very important to California’s financial (and by extension material) future. One harsh criticism of public banks published during the California effort contained this kernel of truth that ought to be useful to the movement’s counter- and pre-emptive strategizing: “the State Department of Business Oversight must review applications for new banks,” the critic writes, “looking at capital, asset quality, management expertise, earning potential and sensitivity to market risk, and given the uncertainty of a public bank’s ability to meet these risk thresholds, it may be years before the DBO could approve a public bank.”

Politically, that’s both a threat and a promise. One might answer—as public banking advocates have effectively and correctly done—that private banks are riskier than public banks in all ways, particularly in the regulatory status quo. But the charter application process contains opportunities for insidious politicization, and very few people have discussed this during the excitement of this legislative push.

Business oversight and banking boards usually have sole or nearly-sole decisionmaking power and applicants have limited ability to seek review of their decisions. The last iteration of the Colorado Banking Board I researched in 2018 included five bank presidents or CEOs, an attorney for a private trust company, a bank V.P., and two members of the public. Courts routinely defer to the decisions of these boards even if they think their decisions were weak. The DBO’s current commissioner is unsurprisingly a veteran of the private financial industry, at Affirm Inc., specializing in high-interest short-term loans.

Activism will have to emerge around that decisionmaking process; it should be openly politicized — and stakeholders should understand that the process is already political; market tests, profitability, even safeguards are already politicized.

The new law also caps the number of public banks allowed in the state at ten, an arbitrary number with no real rationale except to appease the private banking industry, which fears the competition.

If the process of approving and creating public banks can become transparent and include community stakeholders as deciders, then many of my concerns around this would go away. The frustration of such review is that it is so often conducted by industry hacks who refuse to think outside of the box from which they’ve been feeding.

2. A public bank is only as good as the government that runs it–and North Dakota proves this.

Will public banks be chartered with social, economic, and ecological justice-oriented goals and safeguards? The inclusion of such standards was the common demand of every grassroots activist I ever encountered in California’s rapidly growing 2017-2019 public banking movement. Although those standards were not always of precisely defined importance to the PBI crowd that clustered around Ellen Brown between 2008 and now (and far from the concern of some, as I mention below), those concerns drove the motives and conversations of many of us, just as it motivated the original founders of BND in 1919 and in many of public banking’s movements and moments in history.

But such priorities have to be explicit. Otherwise, public banks can actually make fossil fuel consumption, police state violence, and unhinged development worse. California public banking activist David Jette’s insightful and inspiring diary of the origins and successes of California’s public banking fight explains that Wells Fargo helped finance the Dakota Access pipeline and the violent police actions that upheld it. But David doesn’t mention that North Dakota used its own public bank to provide emergency funding to the militarized cops suppressing the Standing Rock protesters. The Bank of North Dakota made fossil fuel fascism easier.

Governments aside, proponents of public banking aren’t all socialists or leftists or liberals or even moderates. Ellen Brown’s early supporters included right-wing anti-monetarists, fans of G. Edward Griffin, a John Birch Society member and co-facilitator of the infamous 2009 conference on Jekyll Island that helped renew the right-wing militia movement. A few somewhat influential contemporary public banking advocates are vocal Trumpians, with all the cheerleading of stormtroopers that entails. Imagine public bank-funded stormtroopers (North Dakota did it). Imagine Trump having a public bank to fund his militarized border wall, or the thousands of other machines of despotism and brutality he would most certainly bring into existence with what public banking’s less rigorous proponents call “free money.”

Obviously I think we should create public banks anyway, and fight the battle against fascism in the streets and the ballot box (although I have to admit that the presence, however minimal, of extreme right-wingers in the movement always made me feel icky). But the reason the California movement succeeded was not that it appeased conservatives—it succeeded because it built an unapologetically left-oriented, social/economic/ecological justice-focused movement inclusive of all the kinds of people and communities currently threatened by Trumpian fascism. California hasn’t always been a perfect bulwark against that threat, but this victory is another reason why it’s been a recently reliable one.

In fact, in the hands of California’s empowered progressive-left coalitions, with an engaged public forcing new paradigms onto old regulatory structures, public banks will do great things in the service of a new, green, egalitarian economy. I like the way David Jette put it:

Everything that a private bank does for local governments and businesses, a public bank can do.  And as these models prove themselves, lawmakers will see how crucial they can be to a thriving, independent economy, and they will expand.  Eventually, a parallel banking system will emerge, one that does not invest in private prisons or fossil fuel extraction, and does not ship profits to Panama or the Cayman Islands to be laundered. Consumers, governments, businesses, everyone will have the option to divest from the old economy and into a new one, one that works for everyone, including the Earth itself.

That’s a world worth fighting for, and the socialization of finance, even to the limited extent that a “public option” in banking manifests, is also worth fighting for.

By the way, the photo here of activists demanding a public bank comes from Kurtis Wu, @kurtis_wu , whose photo contribution has been widely used and deserves a lot of credit for capturing the moment.

Matt Stannard was a communications coordinator, researcher and board member of the Public Banking Institute, was policy director at Commonomics USA, and is operations director at Solidarity House Cooperative, which you can learn about and support here.

Cleveland Baseball Team Won’t Enforce “Offensive Images” Rule on Racists

Some baseball teams, like the Chicago Cubs, have taken proactive approaches to dealing with racist fans. The Cleveland Indians* have not.

My friend Lauren alerted Cleveland Indians management concerning this tattoo in front of her in the security line:

D3kMqZyXsAESsCP

. . . as well as this pic of a different racist tattoo, taken by Lauren’s partner . . .

D-_9ED3XUAAceIn

And Lauren got this response.

“Hi Lauren. Thank you for reaching out to the Cleveland Indians. We are very thankful that you and your family are fans of the Tribe. We want you to enjoy your experience here at the ballpark. If you let the usher or anyone in lower fan services aware of this, [sic] someone can be sent to ask the fan to cover their tattoo if necessary. As well, even if you would not want to be re-located, it is possible though to get re-located for that game if you and your family are at the ballpark.”

Not sure where to begin, but this response places the burden of objecting to racism on the fan, not the club or stadium management. It promises nothing even if the fan does speak up, and then offers to relocate the family — even if they don’t want to?

But we shouldn’t even have to ask these questions. As baseball and politics blogger Sarah Sanchez pointed out in our discussion, the club’s fan behavior section provides that “offensive words or images must be covered or removed from the ballpark”.

Stadiums generally kick people out for yelling at umpires, stop serving alcohol late in the games, and even remind people not to swear because kids are present.

Lauren wrote:

I do have a bee in my bonnet, as they say, about hate speech tattoos at baseball games. I think the reason it bothers me so MUCH is that they wore this into the ballpark! It’s no different than a Nazi t-shirt, right? And the onus is on their seatmates to bring this to the park’s attention? Why? They didn’t just draw this on. They wore it in through security, in front of God and everyone. If people can be refused entry for having restricted items in their bags, for being too drunk, for any number of reasons, why don’t we say the same here? It’s not reasonable to expect their seatmates to take a personal risk to document something everyone can SEE and then – what? Raise it with the same management who let them in and seated them? And have any confidence they’ll take an action? And it’s bad! BAD bad. I shouldn’t have to sit near someone who felt SO STRONGLY about being a Nazi that they literally permanently altered their body so everyone would know HOW NAZI THEY ARE. Is this something I should have to address MYSELF?

So, if you’d like to sound off on this to the Cleveland Indians and Progressive Field, all the information to do that is here.

I write about why we should do everything we can to make racists socially uncomfortable here.

Thanks to Lauren & Yusuf for the pictures and the bravery.

 

* I’m gonna bracket (for now) the question of whether the Cleveland Indians mascot is itself racist (it is).  The fans of clubs with racist mascots deal with that reality in complex and varied ways. This episode is probably connected to such institutional racism in big-picture ways, but is totally worth pointing out by itself. 

by Matt Stannard on July 13, 2019

Why Poor People Don’t Run for Federal Office

by Yana Ludwig
July 1, 2019

I’m running for US Senate as someone who regularly experiences economic insecurity. Here’s a little of how that has been so far.

A few months ago, one of my housemates said to me, “You do the Millennial hustle better than any Millennial I know.” What she was referring to is my multiple part-time jobs and freelancing gigs that comprise my part of keeping the mortgage paid and the lights on.

It was funny and kinda flattering (I’m too old to actually be a Millennial, but I often find that they are the folks I most easily connect with). But her teaching me that phrase brought part of her generation’s struggle into sharper focus: the painful reality I experience around not having work and economic stability is so common for her age mates that they’ve coined a term for it. Ufdah.

There’s pain in this reality. The constant hustle takes its toll, some months there isn’t enough and we have to do that horrible juggling act (pay insurance or get car fixed? delay the dentist for another couple months or skip getting new groceries and eat pantry dregs?). If it wasn’t for the Affordable Care Act, I’d be one of the millions of people who live in fear of waking up in the morning will illness rising and nowhere to go; as is, the co-pay and deductible still discourages “good” choices sometimes.

I’m running for office because of that economic insecurity, and because climate disruption is a real and rising reality for all of us, but especially people of color and poor people everywhere. I’m running now because there is urgency to both, and because the rise of fascism needs people to stand in its way as powerfully as possible. And for some reason I woke up in February with the notion in my head that maybe I could stand up more formally and actually run for office.

So I’m doing this thing, and I’m committed to seeing it through, whether that means it is over in 14 months, 17 months or 8 years. And I was in no way “financially ready” for this.

In fact, I almost didn’t run because of money. One of the first things I learned when I started talking to folks who know more than I do about elections is that candidates can’t pull any kind of salary from their campaign coffers until after the primary filing date closes: in my case, because I’m in a state with a late primary, that means June 6 of 2020. So running means adding to my hustle a nearly full time additional job. That pays nothing. For a year. When I’m already struggling.

But it gets worse. Once you can pull a salary, you are limited to either what you made last year, or what the office you are running for pays, whichever is less. Think that through for a second. That means that someone who makes the big bucks can pull a salary equivalent to $174K (current US Senator salary), and I can pull a salary equivalent of less than $25K, for the same work. It’s blatantly classist and it is hard to believe there wasn’t intentional favoring of rich people to be able to run for office.

My next inquiry was, “Can I crowdfund to help keep my bills paid while I run?” And the answer was, “Nope. Any help people give you because you are running counts as a campaign contribution and is subject to these restrictions.” So that modern desperation go-to isn’t even available. (I can’t even publish this article on my own blog because it is on patreon and will be interpreted as an “ask”.)

My response to learning these things was first despair (CAN I do this? How does anyone do this?!?) then analysis (THIS is why we are so under-represented! I’m seeing the mechanism laid bare!) to deeper commitment (Godammit, someone has to do this. Let’s go!)

But I’m dragging other people along. The financial stress in my life was already there and it is shared stress with my family and community-mates. I’m going through waves of feeling anxious and guilty for this choice, which was, after all, my choice first and foremost. And the more I show up as a candidate, the less I’m available to help get that mortgage paid. 

I’m also harboring deep fears that this is going to compromise my health. I have chronic Lyme disease, which is held in check by daily doses of herbs and being the party pooper who heads for bet at 8:30 most nights. It’s a precarious balance, and falling off that cliff can mean weeks or even months of increased pain and exhaustion. Plus not being able to work for a while, which just leads to more stress and anxiety as the bills pile up and my partner has to double down on his own already exhausting work life.

Then there is the “birds of a feather” phenomenon: I don’t hang out with millionaires, which makes fundraising for anything a challenge. And I don’t have millions of my own money to throw in to my own campaign. An independent candidate in the last Wyoming US Senate race joked in an interview that his wife had agreed to let him spend $1M on his campaign… but he’d do more if she wasn’t paying attention. Isn’t that sexist and cute? And casually unaware of his own privilege?

Reading that article left me feeling the old shame of being a capitalist system failure. I comfort myself with the story that I’ve always been more oriented toward service than a big paycheck, but the reality is that even if I had tried to play that game in earnest, only a handful of people ever “make it” if they don’t start out in a family with a lot of wealth.

So the crux of the “why” is that the deck is stacked against us, both in general and within the minutiae of campaign finance law. My family is going to go through the squeezebox of economic stress over the next year and a half in the hope that I can win a seat at the table and be part of changing the mess that is our electoral system, and win or lose, being a role model for not accepting the hand we’ve been dealt. 

I want public financing. I want Citizens United dead and gone. I want corporate power blunted so that people with a real commitment to the working class and poor can actually stand a chance in our electoral system. And the deeper I get into the stressful, anything-but-justice-based process of running for a federal office, the more fierce that commitment gets. 

Yana Ludwig is the author of Together Resilient: Building Community in the Age of Climate Disruption, and is a candidate for United States Senate. She is a founder of Solidarity Collective in Laramie, Wyoming. 

Photo credit: https://www.yana4wyo.com/platform

 

How to Go Left (& not get left behind) in Wyoming

by Matt Stannard
May 7, 2019

The presumption that the right gets to call the shots is the Wyoming establishment’s greatest political weapon. It has allowed center-right, “moderate” oil and gas pawns to dominate policymaking by allowing the far right and the billionaire class to dominate policy and values rhetoric. Periodically, Wyomingites are reminded that resistance to this arrangement is futile, and besides, we’re all one big small town here, so we best not be getting uncivil about the way we do things (“uncivil” is when anyone besides Al Simpson or Dick Cheney cusses at somebody, or any time poor people, women, indigenous people, queer folks or people of color object to the cultural and material hierarchies of the state).

I’m here to tell you that’s all good old-fashioned Wyoming bullshit. There’s a growing, increasingly vocal, diverse left here, and you’re probably part of it — if you want to be. Here are five ways you can effectively engage the political landscape on this very colonized land.

1. Join (or form) politically independent or transpartisan left groups.

In addition to political parties, there are also independent political advocacy groups that can bring Democrats, Greens, socialists and independents together around common causes or issues. There’s already a Southeast Wyoming chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA is not affiliated with any party but endorses candidates and organizes direct political action around issues of economic justice); maybe you’re reading this in Evanston or Lander and want to organize additional branches. There are progressive coalitions in cities across the state. There are publications and groups like WyoFile and Better Wyoming, there’s Wyoming Equality, and more [I’ll even edit this paragraph to add more groups if you suggest them]. Trans-partisan and multi-party activism gives us strength beyond our numbers and helps us articulate a general left direction for state politics.

2. Support ANY organizations and candidates that push Wyoming leftward — and use your dialogue and solidarity to shape their direction.

If a candidate is left of center but not left of center enough for you, support them and talk to them about why they should be more left of center. If an organization publishes stories about education funding, hate crimes, and LGBTQAA+ rights, support them and push them to cover labor rights and cooperative economics too. Aim to be invitational and not isolationist with anyone seeking to make things even somewhat better here.

In Wyoming, we don’t have the luxury of sectarianism. We can and should be clear about our beliefs and orientations, but we absolutely must find common points of convergence and action in order to push back against the Foster Friessian privatize-everything machine and the incipient fascists in cowboy boots.

3. Stand in solidarity with groups and individuals brave enough to push the boundaries — and proactively defend them when they’re attacked.

The last three years have seen unprecedented creation and growth of an unapologetic, self-identified collection of left, socialist, direct action, anti-ICE and anti-fascist and other groups in Wyoming, and they are out in the streets, on our campuses, in our living rooms, and showing up at the state legislature and other points of engagement. Even if you aren’t a member of any of those groups, those groups need you to be vocal and supportive allies and defenders when they face inevitable right-wing backlash.

Stand with and listen to indigenous people, and with the brave Latinx activists and others fighting against the construction of a private detention facility in Evanston and for freedom from ICE’s brutality across the state. Support Juntos and join their rapid response network. Stand up for the Southeast Wyoming DSA and for the Wyoming Red Star Coalition (remember that the Martin Niemöller poem actually begins “first they came for the socialists”).

There will be pressure from your moderate and conservative acquaintances to denounce “the far left.” Please don’t give in to that pressure.  Those groups are creating good space for all of us, and are taking a lot of personal risks in their endeavors. Be their allies, accomplices, and fellow travelers when you can. Prove to the doubters that an injury to one truly is an injury to all.

4. Speak, write, and share your politics.

A bunch of us here at Solidarity Collective in Laramie produce “Solidarity Wyoming,” a podcast about left politics in Wyoming. We also host public discussions and offer space for groups to have their meetings. We want to amplify those voices that often feel silenced here. We want to see spaces like that activated across the state. Everyone should be amplifying one another’s voices through social media, public discussions, blogs, podcasts, and any other media conduits we can access. If you have opinions, be part of the external political discussion and the internal debates and discussions that will help our ideas evolve and win.

5. Don’t let the right –or the center– define our political reality.

People make political reality when they join together and fight for it. And if every person in Wyoming who doesn’t feel represented by the old elites, who doesn’t want to be defined by underground carbon deposits and their planet-choking extraction and burning, who doesn’t currently vote or votes reluctantly, who’s thinking of leaving but can’t (or is looking for a reason to stay), if all of us got together, we could win local elections, create sizable public demonstrations, form networks of direct action and material solidarity, and support candidates and policies designed to break the hold of ranching and fossil fuels on Wyoming’s means of production–and to actualize Wyoming’s claim to be the Equality State.

Let’s do it. We have nothing to lose but our dusty, oil-and-cowshit-covered chains.

Matt Stannard is Operations Director at Solidarity House Cooperative in Laramie.

Podcast & Watch Guide on Protecting Your Kids from Fascism

Today at Solidarity House Cooperative we posted this special podcast featuring Lindsey Hanlon, Brad Kramer and me talking about how to talk to kids, especially teenage kids, and particularly white and mostly male teenage kids, about the alt-right. In the wake of the latest and worst fascist massacre in New Zealand, we felt like it was important to address the toxicity and danger of youth hate radicalization.

Lindsey, who blogs at Into the Void, also compiled the following list of video resources for parents, kids, and anti-fascist activists.

Contrapoints:

The Darkness (a great take on edgy humor and how it is done well versus how it is done poorly)

 

Decrypting the Alt-Right: How to Recognize a F@scist (what it says on the tin)

 

Incels (a deep dive into the Incel community that manages to be sympathetic but also call out what is really messed up about it)

 

Innuendo Studios:

The Alt-Right Playbook: Mainstreaming (the whole Alt-Right Playbook series is great, but this one is most relevant to what we talked about)

 

Lindsay Ellis:

Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire about N@zis (an excellent look at the irony/boundary pushing discussion, specifically centered around the representation of Nazis)

hbomberguy:

PewDiePie is a Nazi (A lot of hbomberguy’s stuff is great, but again this is the most relevant to the discussion that we had. It’s both an old video and sadly relevant again)

 

Peter Coffin:

Somewhere to Belong: Jordan Peterson and + Alienation (again, many great videos, but this one is super relevant to what we talked about)

 

Angie Speaks:

Jordan Peterson, Jungian Archetypes, and Masculinity (again, awesome in many ways, but this one is most relevant for today)

 

Kat Blaque:

Freedom of Speech + Social Media (again, many great videos, but this one is most relevant for today)

 

Philosophy Tube:

Steve Bannon (a really good look at someone who is helping to normalize radicalism)

Public Banking, State Capitalism and the Collapsing Bridge

January 7, 2018 updated January 8, 11:16 AM

by Matt Stannard

I’ll give away the ironic image-play here. One chief argument for public banks is low-or-no-interest public infrastructure funding, and the exemplar of that argument is the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge retrofit, which cost nearly twice as much as it should have because of interest rates on the money borrowed to complete it. Probably ten people total would get that connection to the title of this post.

The collapsing bridge here is the one between capitalism on the one side and public or democratic control of some financial institutions on the other.

The biggest challenge for the public banking movement is that it was originally conceived –at least in the wake of the Occupy movement of 2011– as a bridge between people who love capitalism and want to save it from the monopolies of the financial sector; and those who believe we need a full-scale transition into cooperative, non-capitalist economics. That bridge may no longer be stable. In a few years, it may not even exist at all, and the movement will have to answer the age-old question of the radical labor struggle: Which side are you on?

Over at Occupy, [EDIT: THE ARTICLE IS HERE] I’ll have an article up later this week (and will edit to add the link) on the ways in which the public banking movement has taken some punches to the gut, from Governor Phil Murphy’s deprioritization of a New Jersey state bank to the defeat of L.A.’s Measure B to the end-of-year news that the report commissioned by California’s Cannabis Banking Working Group strongly recommends against any public option in cannabis banking—bitter (but, as I explain in the article, unsurprising) news for those of us who pushed the public banking option and spoke before the Working Group at its public banking hearing in Los Angeles in 2017.

Deonna Anderson’s good new article on public banking in Yes! magazine doesn’t get into the movement’s recent defeats, but does mention my cautionary report about North Dakota’s use of its state-owned bank to entrench rather than break free from our life-killing dependence on fossil fuels—and the function of that public bank to emergency-fund state repression of protesters at Standing Rock.

Obviously there are different definitions of success, and the anti-scarcity narrative of public banking has tended to use a very generic definition, allowing advocates to tout the success of North Dakota’s extraction industry (made possible in part by the lending of the state-capitalist BND) while also taking some credit for the launch of Germany’s post-carbon transition. In a kind of marshmallow liberal sense, it makes sense that advocates of a type of public entity rather than an entire value system would present their case in value-neutral terms. But humanity is killing itself and major portions of the planet, public control of finance could help reverse course, and there are limits to who we want to spend time and resources winning over in that fight.

For years, the public banking movement has courted the smaller players in the banking industry—particularly community bankers, whom the movement has sometimes flatteringly portrayed as white knights of economic justice–with promises to do what BND does and support small business lending and regulatory compliance among community banks. North Dakota bankers like it and have been willing to say that. Painfully few other leaders in the small-scale end of the financial sector have followed the lead. There are occasionally internal debates in the public banking movement about the utility of continuing to court community bankers, and the “everyone at the table” approach generally wins, though not always by much.

With no community bankers on board, earlier iterations of the movement were often energized by conspiracy theory types (who are sometimes right—I say “conspiracy theory types” more of a description of their political praxis than their particular beliefs) who’d recently read Ellen Brown and learned that, according to a widely supported theory of banking, banks create money by lending it.

But the dominant “banks create money” narrative is a kind of potential red herring to public banking as a political movement. It’s not what chiefly motivates the divestment-oriented eco-justice and new socialist proponents of municipally-owned banks. The language of the narrative, the kind of “look what we discovered about banking that Wall Street doesn’t want you to know,” probably does more harm than good. I get that it’s a compelling and sound argument. But even if banks do not “create money” they do facilitate the creation of value and liquidity, and have the power to erase the practical distinction between having and not having money. Even if “money creation” is more metaphorical than real (there are good reasons to think it’s both), it stands for the proposition that banks are extraordinarily powerful entities in financial infrastructure and for that reason, irrespective of any others, they should be publicly owned.

Mobilizing around that “secret” about banks has made for some strange bedfellows since the beginning, and so at least until the divestment and economic justice movements re-acquainted themselves with public banking, it has been too esoteric, evidenced by the handful of leading public banking exponents who are vocal Trump supporters (in the service of which they make or retweet embarrassingly stupid arguments which I will refrain from linking to here). Some of these people are carry-overs from the section of the movement informed by the anti-banking, anti-federal reserve positions associated with G. Edward Griffin, a Bircher whose 2009 conference on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia helped build the white supremacist militia movement. Anti-Semites and authoritarian-fetishists saw public banks as a means to dismantle the imagined “Jewish hold” over private finance capital, or allow strong dictators to quickly fix the economy. Similarly, in many ways, the “free money” section of the public banking narrative is more a libertarian wish-dream than a democratic socialist template. If we’re careless, all of this becomes a way of bypassing democracy, not actualizing it.

But since Trumpism and vaguely antisemitic conspiracy theories are grounded in the same essential worldview as neoliberalism and finance capital, the right-wing public banking advocates can’t effectively defend the movement from attacks by the finance industry in the form of negative feasibility studies. There’s a fundamental disconnect in someone who believes banks should be run by municipalities in the public interest but also stands by Trump. Allies like that are distractions at best. At worst, they represent the desire for a fantasy-world of authoritarian state capitalism, where powerful demagogues or fascistic parties control giant “public” banks so they can control or quickly fix troubled sectors of the economy, eliminating material rivals rather than being subject to the kinds of deliberative and transparent community control characteristic of, say, democratic socialism.

Public banks may provide a means of sustainable growth. Unless engineered by oligarchs, they will not provide the kind of growth that pleases powerful investors or allows speculation and gambling with other people’s money. But those are precisely the things capitalism presently wants. Public banks won’t save capitalism as it manifests today, and there is no political or policy trajectory towards an “ethical” capitalism, a “green” capitalism, or any other kind of non-exploitative, non-extractive capitalism. The individuals and small groups associated with such visions have no political roadmap, even though they are often smart and nice people. There is no mass movement behind them, nor is there the ground to build such a movement. The occasional entrepreneur-with-the-innovative-solution-to-poverty isn’t enough. Elites can’t, and won’t, transform the material conditions that made them into elites.

What all this ultimately means is that we need democratic, public-centered, commons-centered control of our finance, period. It may not matter what that looks like. There are many great models, some transitionary, some that compromise too much in my opinion, and many that don’t.

Ultimately, economic and ecological justice can’t be about “bringing everyone to the table.” It has to be about bringing willing stakeholders to the table, and rendering the unwilling (and materially predatory) parties irrelevant. It’s been encouraging that movements across California, from Los Angeles to Oakland to San Francisco to Santa Rosa, have begun to adopt that more militant, egalitarian, justice-oriented praxis. I really hope the best for them in the face of yet another rebuke commissioned by conservative public officials and written by those for whom economic democracy is foundationally alien.

Matt Stannard is director of Solidarity House Cooperative and writes, researches, and teaches about cooperative law and economics. He served as policy director for Commonomics USA, and was communications director and later a board member for the Public Banking Institute.