From Kent State to Trump: 50 years later, the same divides plague America

The roots of today's polarization were planted then — as were the destructive neoliberal policies that followed

Posted on Salon: https://www.salon.com/2020/05/04/kent-state-protest-shooting-50-anniversary/

Ted Morgan

May 4, 2020 11:53AM (UTC)

For some of us, the killing of four students at Kent State on Monday, May 4, 1970, is a moment we will never forget.  It was certainly one of the iconic moments of 1960s-era protests, immortalized in Neil Young's "Ohio," with its refrain, "four dead in Ohio."

Students on campuses across the nation erupted in furious, and occasionally violent protest after President Nixon announced on April 30 that American forces in Vietnam had invaded neutral Cambodia. In effect, Nixon acknowledged that he had previously lied to the public.  Students on the fairly conservative Kent State campus began protesting peacefully on May 1, but later that night young people frequenting the town's bars began to disrupt traffic and eventually, amidst a police crackdown, smashed store windows. Tensions grew the next day, and that night the ROTC building on campus was burned. Police and National Guard troops drove students into their dorms.

Tensions escalated on May 3 with armed National Guard troops occupying the campus and Ohio governor James Rhodes declaring the students were "worse than the Brown Shirt and communist elements." That evening students gathered to protest the Guard's presence on campus, a rally broken up by tear gas.

Despite the presence of armed Guardsmen throughout the campus, about 2,000 students gathered for a previously-scheduled rally at noon on May 4, and their numbers grew when nearby classes ended. Although ordered to disperse, and later tear gassed, most students, believing their campus had been invaded, remained. With fixed bayonets and loaded rifles, the Guard advanced on the students, launching more tear gas. Many students retreated, and a standoff resulted, with in most cases about a hundred yards apart separating the two; Guardsmen launched tear gas canisters at the students who, in turn, reviled the Guard with abusive language, while some threw rocks. Few if any imagined the Guards' rifles were locked and loaded, as they were.

Within 30 minutes of the noontime start, a line of Guardsmen suddenly turned to face the students, dropped to their knees, and opened fire. Four students were killed, only two of whom were protesting, and nine were wounded, one permanently paralyzed. Most of those hit were a hundred yards or more from the soldiers.

News reports and John Filo's iconic photograph brought the shocking news to a stunned nation.  In typical fashion the Nixon White House issued a statement blaming the students, claiming "when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy," and Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced the "psychotic and criminal elements in our society." Well over a thousand campuses exploded in student protest, leading to a student strike and 536 campuses shutting down completely, 51 for the remainder of the school year. Ten days after the Kent State shootings, two black students at Jackson State College in Mississippi were killed and 12 were wounded when police opened fire on a women's dormitory during protests against the Cambodian invasion. The Jackson State killings received far less media coverage.

Other Americans echoed the rhetoric of politicians like Agnew and Governor Rhodes, nowhere more than in Kent, Ohio. For weeks, the local paper printed a full page of letters revealing sentiments like "Live ammunition!  Well, really, what did they expect, spitballs?"  "Hooray!  I shout for God and Country … America, support it, or leave it." A prominent local attorney noted that if he were faced with the situation and had a submachine gun, "there probably would have been 140 of them dead, and that's what they need." One non-protesting student returned home to hear her mother pronounce ""It would have been better for America if every student on that hill had been killed." "Mother!" she replied, "I was there. Only a miracle of some kind saved me.  What about that?" To which her mother responded, "You would have deserved it."

After its thorough investigation of the Kent State history, the President's Commission on Campus Unrest observed that, regardless of "intolerable" acts of student violence over the weekend, the "indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable." More generally, the Commission declared,

The crisis on American campuses has no parallel in the history of the nation.  This crisis has roots in divisions of American society as deep as any since the Civil War.  The divisions are reflected in violent acts and harsh rhetoric, and in the enmity of those Americans who see themselves as occupying enemy camps.

That last line may sound familiar to contemporary readers, even if the events of 50 or more years ago don't. It's hard to convey to younger Americans the daily horror that was the American war in Vietnam. Antiwar protest first erupted in the wake of Lyndon Johnson's 1965 escalation of the war, and expanded enormously in subsequent years, spreading across the nation, with increasingly confrontational, and in some cases violent, tactics. By 1970, a majority of Americans opposed the war, and a year later a majority felt the war was "immoral"  — a percentage that would rise significantly in later years.

Indeed, the roots of today's polarization reside in what happened in the 1960s era. Careful scrutiny of media and movement accounts reveals a telling pattern — from civil rights to black power, free speech to campus liberation, as well as the antiwar and women's liberation movements. Each movement in its own way reflected underlying democratic urges — the empowerment of people fundamentally marginalized in American society, the quest for respect for one's personhood, the desire for an American foreign policy that respected the self-determination of other peoples, etc. At some level, all fundamentally posed a challenge to existing American institutions.

It was to this latter, more radical aspect that the mass media were stone deaf. Media discourse ranged between liberal and conservative insiders telling us what the protests meant. The media routinely viewed protests with suspicion, often belittling if not outright condemning them; images of the most flamboyant behaviors — often the more violent or bizarre actions of a few — were highlighted; and politicians from Presidents on down were quick to accuse the protesters of the worst intentions, often equating the wider protest movement with the most disruptive actions of a few. Indeed, if the only way to express "radical" was to be militant, media coverage began to invite "expressive politics" — as it continues to do — a politics that can only attract or repel, but can't really dialogue with those of different perspectives.

Millions of Americans did find those images threatening and/or distasteful, especially when they were told by politicians what "those people" meant. It's hardly surprising to find the gulf between Americans as wide as it was in the aftermath of Kent State.

But there's more to this story.  By demanding the inclusion of vast numbers of previously marginalized Americans — particularly racial minorities, women, and young people — in the American political economy, the '60s era threatened the political and economic status quo. And political and economic elites responded in kind, especially as economic profitability declined in the 1970s. Vast amounts of corporate and foundation monies launched an information counteroffensive that, along with a right wing media onslaught, is still with us today. Capitalism was revived in a new neoliberal form, serving the interests of the 1%. Ronald Reagan became the perfect spokesperson of the new regime because he voiced conservative values and denounced the '60s while simultaneously turning American politics over to the market place and hence the wealthy.

The thread that runs through the political success of neoliberalism is just that: enact policies that favor the wealthy, but use language that feeds on the very kind of resentments that were fed in the '60s era. Neoliberal policies continue to marginalize the very people who felt left out or alienated by the '60s era — as well as their offspring — but it at least makes them feel they are being heard, that the oligarchs are on their side. Enter Donald Trump, and where we are today.

It remains to be seen if people can come together in the wake of the coronavirus to forge a new way forward.  But the need to do so is imperative.

The Immigration Con Job

April 9, 2020

Published in Left Turn Vol. 2 No.1

For many years now, an immigration “crisis” has regularly emerged as a hot topic in the corporate media. Presidents and Members of Congress from both political parties have in different ways raised alarms about undocumented or “illegal” immigrants in the United States. And both parties have raised false expectations that they might resolve the nation’s crisis.

Befitting what Noam Chomsky called the “legitimate discourse” of corporate media, however, there is a familiar commonality to the arguments of both sides. Each side frames its arguments around a kind of moral appeal regarding victims of one kind or another. Both omit the fact that US foreign policy drives much of the flow of immigration, and thus immigration becomes a form of blowback –a phenomenon thrust upon Americans because of US actions largely hidden from public view. In sum, the immigration discourse is sanitized in ways that consistently legitimize the US, while blame is simply cast on the other side of the argument or on the immigrants themselves –a classic example of what Daniel Hallin called the “sphere of legitimate controversy” that leaves out views that are “unworthy of being heard.”(1)

Immigration history and the controversies over contemporary policy are, of course, complex and detailed phenomena. Given space limitations, my intention here is to include enough information from these realms to illustrate the validity of my argument about mainstream discourse. There are, of course, many sources one could pursue to gain a more comprehensive understanding of immigration in the US.(2)

The Contemporary Debate

Echoing earlier Breitbart attacks on President Obama, Donald Trump began tweeting about immigration during the Republican primary of 2016, typically claiming that “I will end illegal immigration and protect our borders! We need to MAKE AMERICA SAFE AND GREAT AGAIN!” During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed that if elected, he would end the “invasion” of “criminals,” “terrorists” and others who “steal American’s jobs.” Evidence suggests that his anti-immigration stance helped him get elected in 2016.(3)

As has been well documented during his presidency, Trumpian discourse is full of lies and inflammatory personal attacks. Whereas Trump claimed that illegal immigrants “compete directly against vulnerable American workers,” studies have demonstrated that immigrants do not, in fact, take American jobs.(4)  As Aviva Chomsky notes, the two major structural developments causing downward shifting employment patterns in the US during the late twentieth century are deregulation and deindustrialization –the latter largely driven by globalizing capitalism.(5)

Nor, as many studies have documented, does immigration cause crime rates to grow; in fact, if anything, immigration produces a slight reduction in the crime rate over time. According to one such study, “Americans have long believed that immigrants are more likely than natives to commit crimes and that rising immigration leads to rising crime…. This belief is remarkably resilient to the contrary evidence that immigrants are in fact much less likely than natives to commit crimes.”(6)

During the 2018 caravan of Central American migrants marching north from Honduras and Guatemala, Trump announced that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in,” creating a “national emergency” requiring the deployment of about a thousand active duty Army troops to the border. The administration later admitted it had no evidence of “unknown Middle Easterners” in the caravan. Furthermore, the administration pressured Mexico to arrest and deport immigrants arriving across Mexico’s border with Guatemala, and Trump threatened the governments of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador with a cut-off of US “massive” aid to those countries –a mere $450 million to the three countries, much of which has bolstered government repression in all three (more on this below).

Trump’s language about crime and job threats is couched as a kind of emotional, moralistic argument appealing to marginalized white Americans’ sense of their victimhood –part of his ongoing appeal to a crucial component of his political base. Trump’s rationale echoes earlier Republican state and local officials’ complaints about the impact of immigration on their communities. As reported by Aviva Chomsky, for example, back in 2014 Massachusetts state representative Mark Lombardo remarked of the “invasion” of children: “We just can’t afford it. We’re not adequately taking care of our own children, our own veterans, our own families who are struggling here in Massachusetts. We gotta put American families first.”(7) Hundreds protested on the Boston Common demanding “Americans before illegals.” These kinds of complaints echo a long US history in which immigrants have been racially “Othered” as a way of allegedly protecting “native” populations.

Detention of Children 

As we shall see, mainstream critics of Trump’s policies also use moralistic arguments revolving around the victimhood of the very immigrants he attacks. From 2017 through 2019, the detention of migrating children increased exponentially; a joint investigation by the Associate Press and Frontline revealed that a total of 69,550 children were so detained over the course of 2019 alone.(8)  Nowhere has public controversy been more evident than in the responses to the Trump administration policy of separating migrating children from their parents and subjecting them to barbaric conditions of long-term detention –a policy begun in April 2018.(9)

The separation of children from their parents, especially when visually documented by television or photojournalism and social media, inflamed the public discourse on immigration, unleashing a torrent of denunciation of this inhumane policy. Images of desperate children held in crowded cells without basic amenities, toddlers abandoned in isolation, and teenagers peering through chain link fences aroused public antipathy towards the detentions. Psychologists and other critics highlighted the traumatic nature of children being separated from their parents (who were then typically returned across the border). “Families Belong Together” protests erupted across the US, and the sponsoring organization’s chair declared, “Thousands have been traumatized, ripped away from their families, and at least six children have died preventable deaths in custody…. Congress must act to end these abuses immediately.”(10)  In June 2019, Congress passed a compromise bill providing $4.6 billion in humanitarian relief, including some funds for enhanced border enforcement.

Fearing lawsuits (which soon occurred), administration officials had earlier discussed ways they might claim that the policy made children safer. Initially, officials defended the practice of separation and detention as a “deterrent” to future immigration, yet failing to mollify the critics, they began to couch the detentions of children as a way of protecting them from “criminals” and “smugglers.” As former Office of Refugee Resettlement, Scott Lloyd put it, the administration had a “moral imperative” to “protect children from smugglers and ensure that gangs were not exploiting the shelter system to enter the country.”(11)  By contrast, a New York Times op-ed denounced the family separation policy as “immoral.”(12)

The “Wall,” Militarized Border, and Deportation 

Detention of children hasn’t been the only controversy over Trump’s immigration policies. His bombastic claim that he would build an impenetrable wall across the US-Mexico border became a hot-button issue in both the media and Congressional debates. Although only a minor portion of a wall has been built, Trump continues to claim he will find the funds to construct it.

Similarly, in response to the wave of Central American immigrants approaching the border (or marching in the “caravan”), Trump dispatched Army and National Guard troops to block their entry, in addition to increasing the numbers of border patrol agents. As noted by immigration analysts Douglas Massey and Karen Pren, escalating border restraints have a kind of self-fulfilling impact: border apprehensions increase even as actual migration numbers level off or decline, and thus they are used by politicians and bureaucrats to inflame public opinion, leading to more restrictive immigration policies.(13)

Finally, inflamed fears of undocumented immigrants in the United States have been used to facilitate the removal of millions of immigrants over the years. Trump’s incendiary language and brutal enforcement policy via the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) became a particularly inflammatory part of the “sphere of legitimate controversy.” ICE tracks down immigrants in their homes, schools and workplaces, holds them in custody, determines their ‘criminality,’ and typically returns them to their native countries, where they face the very real threat of violence they originally fled from. Legitimate grounds for deportation were expanded from actual criminal convictions to “pending criminal charges” or being a “known gang member,” subject to ICE interpretation. Newspaper headlines warned of “Mass Migrant Roundups,” and undocumented immigrants curtailed their activities and lived with constant anxiety about their potential apprehension. In the words of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Trump’s policies were “deeply immoral,” and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and other Democrats have called for the abolition of ICE.(14)  Aimed at Latin Americans, ICE’s enforcement can be seen as an extension of broader, racist criminal justice practices in the US.

Whereas Trump’s deportation policies have stirred significant controversy, they are nothing new. President Clinton oversaw the repressive Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act in 1996 and had 1,864,343 immigrants either “removed” (arrested on criminal charges) or “returned” (sent back over the border via administrative action) during the year 2000 (188,467 were removed). In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush oversaw the creation of ICE, passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (that, like the “Illegal Immigration Reform Act” increased the number of categories of criminal activities by immigrants and green card holders) as well as the removal or return of 1,171,028 immigrants in 2008 (359,795 were removed).(15)

While President Obama has often been praised by liberal commentators for his “Dream Act” (DACA), aimed at protecting children of undocumented immigrants who were born in the US, he has also been labeled the “deporter in chief” by immigration advocacy groups, largely because the number of “removed” immigrants increased substantially during his presidency (333,592 in 2016). His policies created a division between a relatively few “good” immigrants (DACA recipients) and the remaining “bad” or “criminal” 10 million or so undocumented immigrants. It should also be mentioned that tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, whose industries depend on immigrant labor, have funded organizations like FWD.us to push for “comprehensive immigration reform,” while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella criticized the precariousness of the “high skilled labor” necessary for “American competitiveness.”

A Factual Context for the Contemporary Debate

Not surprisingly, the contemporary immigration debate echoes the history of immigration to the United States. In successive waves, the Irish and Germans; Southern and Eastern Europeans and Jews; the Chinese, Japanese and eventually all Asians, encountered a virulent backlash, variously targeting their alleged immorality, criminality, disease, or in the case of the Chinese, racial characteristics that made them “aliens” who could not be assimilated. Aiming to “preserve the ideal of American homogeneity,” the 1924 Immigration Act created the first, sharply-limited quotas for European immigrants, and banned immigrants from Asia. Immigrants from the Western hemisphere faced no such restrictions. [It should be added that post-9/11 Arabs and Moslems in general faced harshly racist attacks.]

Beginning during World War II, Mexican immigrants were encouraged to enter the US to fill vacant industrial jobs. From the 1940s until its elimination in the mid-60s, the government’s Bracero Program brought millions of mostly Mexican “guest workers” to perform the most onerous agricultural work, chiefly on the expansive farms of California. Finally with passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, immigration from all nations were subjected to quotas. The aftermath of the Act saw a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America (including Mexico) so that more than half of all foreign born Americans in 2017 came from Latin America, a significant number being unauthorized.

Much of the contemporary hype about immigration focuses on “illegal” immigrants, chiefly those from Mexico and Central America. Yet, as Aviva Chomsky has noted, their very “illegality” was created by the 1965 quota system. Prior to that, Latinos and Latinas weren’t illegal in any sense, though for years it was chiefly Mexican migrant workers who came during the agricultural months and returned home.

The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the US grew rapidly from around 1990 to a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 to an estimated 10.5 million in 2017. 2011 saw a surge in immigration from the three “Northern Triangle” nations of Central America –Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Between 2007 and 2017, the estimated number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico fell by 2 million –a drop-off attributed to growing US hostility and improved opportunities in Mexico —  whereas the estimated number from Central America increased by 400,000.(16)

As controversies around immigration swirled, a number of liberal commentators in the media began to note that, in contrast to the punitive stance of the Trump administration, the current “crisis” was being “pushed” by the violence prevalent in all three Northern Triangle nations, rather than “pulled” by the potential of economic opportunity. The official “legitimate” explanation for the violence coming from the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018 was that the Northern Triangle “remains menaced by corruption, drug trafficking, and gang violence.” This explanation has echoed through much of the corporate media where Central American violence has been fingered as a catalyst for immigration. The New York Times, for example, ran a multi-page article on the plight of victimized women in Guatemala. Filled with grim details about widespread fear and stories of rape and murder victims, the 6000-word article about migrants “fleeing a society controlled by criminals” includes two fairly brief references to the United States, both critiquing Trump’s repressive policies and his threat to cut off aid to the Northern Triangle –aid “we now spend on strengthening civil society and chipping away at the power of gangs and drug cartels.”(17) The piece can be seen as an appeal to the moral conscience of Americans. What is telling is what is left out.

The Invisible Actor: US Foreign Policy

Responsibility for the out of control violence in the Northern Triangle can be laid directly at the feet of the United States. In 1954, the US overthrew the democratically-elected Arbenz regime in Guatemala because Arbenz was planning to seize unproductive land held by United Fruit (paying the going market rate) for distribution to peasant farmers. Falsely labeling Arbenz a Communist, the US replaced him with the Rios-Mont dictatorship which proceeded to wipe out 200,000 mostly indigenous Mayans over the next few decades — an act much later officially labeled “genocide” by the Historical Clarification Commission. The New York Times’ report on the commission findings noted that “the United States gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed “acts of genocide” against the Mayans during … Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.”(18) Entirely absent were any independent details about the extent of US military training and support, to say nothing of the overthrow of the Arbenz regime that established the US-backed genocidal regime. The Times routinely refers to struggles against the US-backed oppression in Guatemala and El Salvador as “civil wars,” rendering the crucial US role invisible.

While the US supported military police states in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua for decades, it wasn’t until the 1980s that US policies began to have significant immigration implications. After the Sandinista-led revolution overthrew the US-backed Somozan dictatorship in Nicaragua, the US waged an unrelenting proxy war to overthrow the (as of 1984) democratically-elected Sandinista government, at the same time continuing to provide military training and support for the savagely repressive regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. In 1980-81 alone, the Salvadoran military and right wing terrorists killed 35,000 Salvadoran civilians  — 75,000 over the decade of the 1980s. At the same time, the US built up a powerful US-backed military in Honduras as the staging ground for its war on Nicaragua. Thousands fled these repressive conditions — some 10% of all Salvadorans among them.

The US response is instructive. Refugees fleeing the so-called “totalitarian” Nicaragua, assaulted by the US Contra War, were granted political asylum. Peasants fleeing for their lives from the horrifically repressive Salvadoran and Guatemalan forces were not classified as political refugees, but “economic immigrants,” most of whom were thereby denied legal entry or shipped back to an almost certain death. During the Clinton administration, passage of the Nicaraguan and Central America Relief Act allowed asylum seekers from Nicaragua to obtain legal status in the US, but prohibited this and ordered deportation for mostly Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans who lacked a previous visa or who previously violated US immigration laws.

The mostly Salvadoran refugees who made it to the US tended to settle in the Los Angeles area. Their children grew up in poor, racially isolated neighborhoods where established gangs of Mexicans (to say nothing of the more established Crips and Bloods) often ruled the day. By the early 1980s Salvadoran youths drawn into the dominant Mexican gang broke off and formed their own gang, Mara Salvatrucha –roughly meaning ‘gang of vigilant Salvadorans’ — or MS-13. Traveling back and forth to El Salvador, MS-13 began to gain a foothold in that country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. With the 1996 passage of the Illegal Immigration and Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, however, the US stepped in and began deporting thousands of gang members who subsequently wreaked havoc in El Salvador. It wasn’t long before El Salvador began to be labeled the “murder capital” of the world (to be replaced later by Honduras), and gang violence spread into Guatemala. In both countries, gangs have carried out often violent work for drug traffickers and organized crime syndicates.

In 2009, Hondurans had for the first time in memory elected a reformist president, Mel Zelaya. However, the Honduran military, with US backing by the Obama administration, executed a coup that was condemned throughout the hemisphere with the exception of the United States. Subsequently, Hondurans have had to endure violent repression and social chaos. Most recently Hondurans have matched or exceeded the numbers of immigrants coming from the other Northern Triangle nations.

In the end, US policy rejects immigrants fleeing violence for which the US bears major responsibility, instead returning them to face a bleak chance at survival –a situation for which, the US is also responsible. This clearly contradicts any claim of morality. But what’s more important is that it is also structural, and therein lies the key to finding a way forward. As David Feldman has observed, “Moral pleas and strident denunciations of xenophobia and hate that are not simultaneously buttressed by an anti-capitalist critique practically invite co-optation by the multicultural corporate elite.”(19)

Historically, the United States has unilaterally granted itself the right to forcefully cross national borders at will –a right that is unquestioned in the corporate media. This “right” evolves from an imperial foreign policy designed to sustain the US as a global hegemon maintaining reliable access to the exploitation of human and natural resources and to world markets –in short a climate conducive to profitable investment. The implications of such a policy were spelled out by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis Judd in their book The Democratic Façade:

"The important features of a good business climate, as defined by corporate and foreign policy elites, are: a tractable low-paid labor force; an absence of worker-controlled unions; weak or nonexistent environmental protection laws; lax health and safety regulations in the work place; tax concessions and government subsidies for business; the use of public money to provide the infrastructure necessary for the functioning of business; and laws permitting the tax-free repatriation of corporate profits back to the United States."

They add: "Because political revolutions commonly arise in reaction to such a system of exploitation, a repressive political system is a necessary feature of a ‘good business climate.’"(20)

In short, the US seeks to impose a neoliberal world on the peoples of Latin America, and has done so consistently. Increasingly, of course, corporate elites, and the Republican Party in particular, seek to impose such a world on the American people.

Needless to say, the impact of US foreign policy extends well beyond Latin America. Indeed, the mass migration from the Middle East to Europe has been driven by the decades of war and chaos the US has imposed on that region. And globally, much immigration from the South to the North reflects the long history of Euro-American colonial and imperial exploitation. In both European and American contexts aroused fears about these waves of immigration have helped right wing and nativist interests gain political power, thereby skewing the political discourse to the right.

Furthermore, it must be added, immigration, whether documented or undocumented, is highly functional for capitalist economies. Most immigrants provide relatively cheap labor for the US economy; they often fill low-pay, menial jobs that Americans are loathe to accept, and by keeping the labor pool expanding they enable corporations to suppress wages.

The implications of the restricted discourse in our corporate media and political institutions are profound. An understanding of the roots of the immigration problem point to a very different kind of debate, one that foresees a democratic world far different from the neoliberal capitalist order we live in.

Nancy Fraser has argued that the 2016 Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns reveal that public support for neoliberalism has declined to the point that there is now potential for a new counterhegemonic ideology to take root. Debate between “progressive neoliberalism” represented by the Democratic Party mainstream, and “reactionary neoliberalism” represented by Donald Trump and the Republican mainstream is consequently “dying.” Instead, she sees Bernie Sanders candidacy (and popular base) representing “progressive populism” and Donald Trump’s rhetoric and his base representing "reactionary populism." To counter the reactionary element with more progressive neoliberalism is to “exacerbate the very conditions that created Trump. And that means preparing the ground for future Trumps, even more vicious and dangerous.”(21)

In effect, the same can be said of the immigration debate. To counter the horrors of Trumpian policy merely with moral pleas and humanitarian improvements in immigration control, is simply to perpetuate immigration “problems,” to say nothing of a horrific US foreign policy. In no way does it move us closer to a truly democratic world.

Endnotes

1. Daniel Hallin, “The Media, the War in Vietnam, and Political Support: A Critique of the Thesis of an Oppositional Media,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Feb. 1984), 21.
2. Along with several articles, Aviva Chomsky has written two helpful books on the subject: “They Take Our Jobs” and 20 Other Myths about Immigration (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007) and Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).
3. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-klinker-immigration-election-20170417-story.html (accessed 1/20/2020).
4. “Americans Aren’t Being Squeezed Out of Jobs by Immigrants, Report Finds,” Julia Preston, New York Times, September 21, 2016, A16. The article focuses on a report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.
5. Aviva Chomsky, “They Take Our Jobs,” 4. See her Myth 2: “Immigrants compete with low-skilled workers and drive down wages.”
6. Mary C. Waters and Marisa Gerstein Pineau, Editors, The Integration of Immigrants into American Society, National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Washington, DC, National Academies Press, 2015).
7. Aviva Chomsky, “The United States’ Continuing Border Crisis: The Real Story Behind the ‘Invasion’ of the Children.” Truthout, August 25, 2014. 
8. https://apnews.com/015702afdb4d4fbf85cf5070cd2c6824 (accessed 1/20/2020).
9. See https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/doctor-compares-conditions-immigrant-holding-centers-torture-facilities/story?id=63879031 (accessed 1/27/2010).
10. Quoted in Eoin Higgins, “Causing ‘Profound’ Trauma, Trump Administration Detained Record-Breaking 70,000 Children in 2019.” Common Dreams, November 12, 2019.
11. Nena Satija et al, “Border Crisis No Surprise,” Washington Post, November 19, 2009, reprinted in the Morning Call, 15. The latter part of the quote is the newspaper’s text.
12. Dora Galacatos, Alan Shapiro, and Brett Stark, “The Cruel Ploy of Taking Immigrant Kids From Their Parents,” New York Times, March 2, 2018, A23. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/immigrant-children-deportation-parents.html?searchResultPosition=1, accessed 3/4/2018).
13. Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America.” Population and Development Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (March 2012), 9 & 22.
14. Ron Nixon and Linda Qiu, “What is ICE and Why Do Critics Want to Abolish It?” New York Times, July 4, 2018, A18. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/us/politics/fact-check-ice-immigration-abolish.html, accessed 1/22/2020).
15. These figures are from the New York Times editorial, “All Presidents Are Deporters in Chief,” July 13, 2019, SR10.
16. Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, ‘Mexicans Decline to Less Than Half the US Unauthorized Immigrant Population For the First Time,” Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/us-unauthorized-immigrant-population-2017/, accessed 6/30/2019.
17. Sonia Nazaario, “’Someone Is Always Trying to Kill You,” New York Times, April 7, 2019, SR1ff.
18. Mireya Navarro, “Guatemalan Army Waged ‘Genocide,’ New Report Finds,” New York Times, Feb. 26, 1996, A1 (emphasis added). 
19. David B. Feldman, “’Pro-Immigrant’ Liberalism and Capitalist Exploitation: Why Corporate Democrats Do Not Support Immigration Justice,” Truthout, February 18, 2018.
20. Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd, The Democratic Façade (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1996), 296.
21. Nancy Fraser, The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born (London: Verso, 2019), 28.

The Message—and Meaning—of COVID-19

Published on Friday, April 03, 2020

by Common Dreams

Coronavirus is neoliberalism’s Chernobyl.

Neoliberal capitalism will not, and cannot, provide universal health care. (Photo: Jonny White/cc/flickr)

There is, perhaps, a silver lining in the dark cloud of anxiety, fear, suffering and death brought to us by the coronavirus pandemic.  Namely a growing, intense awareness that we are all one.  We humans.  The entire globe that is engulfed by this disease.

Similar glimpses of this awareness once came from the image of a fragile blue planet photographed from the moon.  Scientists aren’t alone in reminding us that climate change and/or nuclear Armageddon also pose the same kind of “shared fate.”

But now we can all see it and feel it.  We are connected in fate to everyone else on the planet, including those who are normally invisible to us.  Feeling our own vulnerability, we feel more profoundly the suffering of others around the world.

While repeatedly misled by a juvenile president who simply makes stuff up, this administration has taken the neoliberal creed practiced by his predecessors to a new extreme.

People are reaching out to help others, shopping for shut-ins, sending thanks to health care workers, ordering food from restaurants to help keep them going, etc.  Thanks to the internet and media we can feel the spirit of our fellow humans singing from the balconies of Italy, Spain, China, and Iran.  If we can to get outside to walk, we are often greeted warmly by smiling strangers.  And we are unhurried.  What’s the point of rushing?

What a contrast to life as we usually know it.  What would life be like if we normally acted as if we were all one?  What if our political and economic systems were not structured around being competitors, adversaries and enemies of others, systematically repressing our fundamental empathy for our fellow humans?

World religions teach us the fundamental principle that we are all one. Yet, as institutions, they often help to fuel wars and indoctrinate people to be obedient, while failing to challenge the very systems that violate their ethical principles.

Our capitalist economy produces inequality and thrives on the stratification and status anxieties that inequality breeds. In the neoliberal version we have been living under for 40 years, everything has been made subservient to that system. Government as a form of collective action through which we can realize desirable public goods has largely disappeared, replaced by its contemporary owners –for that’s what they are— pursuing their self-interests.

Which brings me back to the coronavirus.  While repeatedly misled by a juvenile president who simply makes stuff up, this administration has taken the neoliberal creed practiced by his predecessors to a new extreme.

Thus collective action is a last resort. Mobilizing government to anticipate and plan for a pandemic like this one, to ensure the nation is well stocked with necessary equipment, or to impose quarantines to contain the spread of the virus –all are contradictions of the neoliberal creed.  As someone put it, the coronavirus is neoliberalism’s Chernobyl.

To top things off, stimulated by concern for the falling stock market, the government generates an unprecedented 2.2 trillion dollars in aid, the greatest proportion going to corporations whose profits have been endangered by the pandemic.  That, too, is normal fare for neoliberalism –and, for that matter, our political system generally.  And now, what else, talk of an additional tax cut geared to higher income people?

While we face a shared fate, suffering from the coronavirus will not be same for everyone.  Outside of the greater vulnerability of older people, millions in this country and around the world will not be able to get access to adequate health care.  Children in crowded cities have far higher rates of asthma, making them at risk from the virus. Health care workers, Amazon workers, delivery people are also far more susceptible, in good part because of inadequate protective gear.

Yet, neoliberal capitalism will not, and cannot, provide universal health care.  How telling, then, that a progressive candidate like Bernie Sanders is repeatedly challenged by “who will pay” for Medicare for All, and “what about the deficit”?  Yet a one-shot $2 trillion government expenditure for the coronavirus, and questions about the deficit and who will pay are brushed aside.

In the end, the coronavirus is an invitation to go forward in a different way, democratically, as if we were all one.  In fact, we have to learn how to do this if we are going to avoid the ultimate shared fate. One difference: we the people will need to lead the way.

Why The Democrats Should Back Bernie Sanders, and Why They Won't If They Can Possibly Help It

Published by Common Dreams, February 13, 2020

     This could represent the beginning of a real healing of America's tragic history of race and class.

 

If they were smart, the Democratic Party would support Bernie Sanders as their nominee.  But of course, they won’t, if there’s any way they can prevent his nomination.

Not surprisingly, Sanders’ PAC-supported or big money opponents, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg, have belittled his candidacy.  But the Party’s old guard –Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barney Frank— have also publicly attacked and/or worked against Sanders.  Barack Obama has intimated that he would try to prevent a Sanders nomination.

Even worse, the liberal corporate media have repeatedly dismissed, attacked, and underreported Sanders and his campaign.  New York Times opinion writers –Paul Krugman, Timothy Egan, Frank Bruni, Bret Stephens, and David Brooks— have virtually lined up to dismiss the Sanders campaign; ‘he can’t win,’ ‘he’s like Trump only his opposite,’ are common refrains.  Washington Post columnists follow suit, and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews went off the rails implying Sanders’ rather tame version of democratic socialism could lead to public executions.

Similarly, the well-endowed Democratic PAC, the Democratic Majority for Israel, funded attack ads on Sanders in Iowa, while the corporate Partnership for America’s Health Care Future has mobilized to “change the conversation around Medicare for All” to protect the for-profit healthcare industry.  And, of course, the powerful right-wing attack machine, from Charles Koch’s organization to the Federalist¸ have been mobilizing propaganda attacks on Sanders.

There will be a great deal more of this in the coming months, as these interests try to bury Bernie Sanders’ truly populist message.

Let’s look at their arguments: “Sanders can’t beat Trump” and “Bernie is too far left.”

The latest Quinnipiac national poll (pre-New Hampshire) has Sanderse 8 percentage points ahead of Trump, shortly after Trump’s post-impeachment bump, and Sanders’ campaign will vividly bring out the enormous contradictions in the Trump administration. 

But more fundamentally, are any of the centrist Democratic candidates likely to beat Trump with their ‘more of the same’ arguments?

The New York Times’ conservative columnist David Brooks revealed data showing that tens of thousands of voters in the key swing-to-Trump states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin voted for Sanders in the primary and Trump in the election –in sufficient numbers to cost the Democrats the election.

However, Brooks draws a dubious conclusion from the data, suggesting Bernie voters will sit out the election if a different Democrat is nominated.  Voters who voted for Sanders in those primaries but Trump in the general election are not Sanders’ fervid young supporters, but in all likelihood largely alienated white working class or rural Americans, fed up with a Democratic Party that long ago deserted them.

In short, the data don’t suggest abandonment of Democratic nominees as much as they suggest the potential for Sanders, alone among Democratic candidates, to pull working class and rural votes away from Trump.

A second way that Sanders expands the potential Democratic voter base is the fact that hundreds of thousands of diverse young people have been inspired by his sharp critique of corporate-dominated inequality, his advocacy of the Green New Deal, and generally his vision of a more democratic future.

Among other things, these young people see in Sanders someone who recognizes the profound economic, social and ecological problems which will plague their future lives.  They bring enormous energy and enthusiasm to a Sanders candidacy.

They and others, recognize the authenticity of Sanders’ politics; he has consistently fought for the concerns he raises.  As political writer Robert Scheer has observed, Bernie “actually believes in the grassroots.  He actually believes that an ordinary person in Vermont can make intelligent decisions about the human condition, and about justice and freedom… [one] reason Bernie Sanders can survive the rhetorical assaults [against him]….”

On the one hand, Sanders’ candidacy inspires political activism among the young and those with long-held social justice grievances.  On the other hand, he speaks authentically to long disenchanted working class whites and rural Americans.  As Scheer put it, “I think what makes Bernie Sanders authentic is his respect for the ordinary person.”  It’s no accident that he easily won the Vermont primary in every town in the state, so widely is he respected by constituents who have come to know him.

Sanders is not “too far left” for these voters; his essentially New Deal-type programs are too far left for Democrats like Bill Clinton who moved the Party into the corporate center some 40 years ago.

The real hope represented by Bernie Sanders’ campaign is that he can pull together these sharply separated populations –in the process shifting the focus to the elite forces whose propaganda has kept them apart.

This could represent the beginning of a real healing of America’s tragic history around race and class.  It could also represent what the political scientists like to call a “realignment” of American politics, one which promises far more democracy than the sad democratic façade we live under. 

Don't Count on Capitalism to Defeat Climate Change

Capitalist states, by their nature, protect their own interests — not collective ones. Is there still hope? 

Salon  https://www.salon.com/2019/10/19/dont-count-on-capitalism-to-defeat-climate-change/

October 19, 2019

The bad news just keeps coming.  Again and again, science-based studies uncover increasing evidence that the planet is headed toward unfathomable disaster.

In the last year alone, we have seen publication of the US National Climate Assessment’s Fourth NationalClimate report,  the UN Global Sustainable Development report (“The Future is Now”), the US NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administration report, the World Meteorological Association report onAccelerating Climate Change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on Climate Change and Land and Ocean and Cryosphere, the Science Advisory Group to the UN Climate Action Summit’s report “United in Science,” to say nothing of countless articles in science journals warning that catastrophe lies ahead.

As “United in Science" put it, current efforts need to be “roughly tripled to be aligned with the 2^o C goal and increased fivefold to align with the 1.5^o C goal” adopted by the 2016 Paris Agreement (emphasis added).”

Hence we are confronted by the damage already resulting from climate change: more intense and frequent extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, droughts, forest fires, and heat waves; rising sea levels that threaten the homes, lives and livelihoods of millions of people; and melting ice caps and permafrost, among others.

The consensus among science-based reports is that the path ahead is far worse: widespread food and water scarcity, increased exposure to diseases and allergic illnesses, economic decline, and damage to the “infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.”

As Noam Chomsky put it, “To describe these challenges as ‘extremely severe’ would be an error. The phrase does not capture the enormity of the kinds of challenges that lie ahead.”

We can observe three kinds of responses to the crisis of climate change.  First, activism on a global scale is clearly on the rise, commonly led by young people who will bear the greatest burden of climate change.

Millions participated the global Climate Strike on September 20.  530 groups from around the world signed on to the Lofoten Declaration calling for rapid phasing out of fossil fuels.

One of the signers, the Extinction Rebellion, has mobilized two weeks of dramatic direct action and civil disobedience in cities from New York and Philadelphia to London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Amsterdam, Toronto and Sydney: from traffic blockades to rallies, marches, and street theatre to throwing red paint on Wall Street’s bull statue.  Some 200 young mothers marched from Westminster to 10 Downing Street where they engaged in a Nurse-In, nursing the babies they seek to protect from climate disaster.

Second, most nations of the world, many states and localities within the United States, even some corporations and the US military, now recognize that the world faces a profound challenge.  Several governments have taken preliminary steps toward altering their emissions, and even more have pledged to do so.

In contrast to the energy of the Climate Strike and the warnings of the UN Science Advisory Group warning, the UN Climate Action Summit produced only modest pledges from a minority of nations.

These steps remain woefully inadequate if the world is to avoid a cataclysmic outcome.

Why this relative inaction in the face of global catastrophe?  The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the world’s developed capitalist economies, with China and the US leading the way.  By contrast, people in nations that have the least impact on climate change are most vulnerable to the worst of its effects.

This climate injustice is only one manifestation of the inequalities and injustices built into the capitalist powers’ imperial exploitation of the “under-developed” world.  In the late Immanuel Wallerstein’s framework, the core capitalist powers compete with each other for dominance in exploiting the resources of the underdeveloped periphery nations.

Consequently, each of the capitalist powers is loathe to weaken its competitive position vis à vis the other capitalist economies.  In a capitalist world, each economic unit must act to protect what it deems its own interests.  The only counterweight comes from the public sector.

Yet in a capitalist world, each public authority — local, state or national government — is constrained by the fear that pushing public interests too far will cause capital flight, thereby undermining its viability.  And, of course, corporations and the wealthy dominate the shaping of public policy — nowhere more than in the US.

This is the way capitalism works, which suggests how profound and systemic the changes will have to be if the world is to avoid catastrophe.