Human Rights Day, December 10, 2024

 A Short History and Memoire

Human Rights and I stretch way back

An early encounter was in December of the mid-70s when an older activist asked me to write something about Human Rights Day that concerned workers. As an autoworker and UAW activist, I complied and wrote how workers have a human right to affirmative action, not only to benefit the black, brown, and female but for the rest of the working class, who benefit more from solidarity than discrimination.

On leave from Chrysler in 1993, I was teaching in Ecuador during a popular uprising. Some of my high-school students told me they got access to arrested protesters by telling the guards they were Human Rights workers, an occupation with palanca or leverage, even for teens.

In Lebanon, Human Rights was in the national curriculum by law, and from 2002 to 2004, I incorporated Human Rights in all my classes (along with adolescence, the family, exile, and others).

On a return trip in 2006, I ran into a couple of seniors, my old tenth-grade students. "What is Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR]," I asked.

In unison, they answered, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience, and they should act towards one another in the spirit of brotherhood." My heart sang.

The UDHR has an ancient pedigree with many tributaries.

• The Code of Hammurabi: punishment must be proportional (1750 BCE)
• The Charter of Medina, the last sermon by Prophet Mohamed (PBUH), which declared the values of justice, equality (religious and civil), and peace in Islamic civilization (632 CE)
• Magna Carta (1215 CE): the king is not above the law
• The Declaration of Independence (1776)
• The Rights of Man and the Citizen (France, 1789)
• The Bill of Rights (U.S. Constitution, 1791)
• The Geneva Conventions on conduct in armed conflicts (drafted and amended throughout the twentieth century)
• FDR's Four Freedoms Speech (January 1941): Not commonly remembered as a war speech, it proposed what we would be fighting for, not just against.
• First in 1962 and again in 2018, I stood on the foggy banks of Ship Harbor, Newfoundland, where in August 1941, the allies signed the Atlantic Charter, which enumerates principles of freedom and peace in a post-war order.
• Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI)(1990, 2020)

 FDRs widow, Eleonor, chaired the 1948 United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which marshaled ethicists, jurists, philosophers, diplomats, and politicians from across the globe to craft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United Nations on December 10, 1948.

An American Teacher and Italian Lesbian Walk into a Bar

FDRs widow, Eleonor, chaired the 1948 United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which marshaled ethicists, jurists, philosophers, diplomats, and politicians from across the globe to craft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United Nations on December 10, 1948.

One of the principal authors of the UDHR text was the Lebanese Christian Charles Malik, whose nephew, Wael Kheir—also a Human Rights defender—I met in Lebanon. 

That's he (right) and I in the photo above.

In a Beirut bar, I struck up a conversation with a couple of Italian women, one of whom had access to a hefty purse of European Commission of Human Rights Protector funds. She was empowered to evaluate any putative human rights protector and hand over the cash. I told her that she had to meet Wael Kheir. It was a curious meeting. Wael, like his uncle, a devout Maronite Catholic, got on his high horse about abortion. The Italian, a no-nonsense Lesbian ex-communist, interrupted him, saying, "You've done nothing but lecture me about abortion. I'm here to give you money." After a few moments of embarrassed silence, Wael got down to business.

In 2005, I parlayed my 1990 graduate school teaching experience into a gig teaching English composition at the University of Delaware. My research paper unit was always based on the UDHR, even when I began teaching classes full of students from the People's Republic of China (PRC). Many finessed the theme, confining their topics to environmental issues tolerated in the PRC or U.S. civil rights.

Some were extraordinary.

One young woman cited Hannah Arendt’s theory of the "banality of evil." She argued that folks who joined the Chinese Communist Party were often more careerist than communists. They were like Adolf Eichmann, the "bureaucrat" in Arendt's terms, who disinterestedly executed the final solution against the Jews.

Another student directly challenged the UDHR for its acquiescence to colonialism, which feebly stipulated that Human Rights extend to those under "any . . . limitation of sovereignty."

Well, I thought it was more than feeble acquiescence, and, hey, the UDHR Preamble green lights the right "to rebellion against tyranny and oppression." Still, I love for my students to challenge class assumptions. And this student introduced me to the Cairo Declaration, an Islamic answer to the UDHR, which it cites and largely tracks but declares in its Article 10, "Foreign occupation, subjugation and colonialism of all types are totally prohibited."

Hmm.

The Rules-Based International Order

The UDHR, the UN Charter, Geneva Conventions, various treaties, and tribunals like the International Criminal Court (ICC) comprise "the Rules-Based International Order." America is proud that our founding documents are echoed in the Universal DeclarationRF and that its principles, in the words of President Reagan, "[are] more than just words: It's a global testament of humanity, a standard by which any humble person on Earth can stand in judgment of any government on Earth."

The main criticism of this Order is its unequal application, as if the eliding of explicit anti-colonialism in the UDHR was intentional.

Some will argue that for the wretched of the earth, the Rules-Based Order is a dead letter. Where was this Order, they ask, when peaceful Palestinians were gunned down by the hundreds in 2018 at the Great March of Return near the Gaza-Israel border? Or when the Palestinians were first expelled in 1948, or occupied for decades, their lands stolen by Israeli settlers, their people subject to an apartheid system of laws, or Gaza subject to war crimes and even genocide?

Well, the Rules-Based Order has finally turned its sights west and north, as well as east and south. ICC warrants have been issued for the leaders of Israel for war crimes as well as Hamas for the atrocity on October 6. My country stands complicit in these alleged crimes with over 50,000 tons of munitions it has delivered to Israel since October 2023 (ProPublica), and my beloved Human Rights regime is on the brink.

While workers recalled from UDHR Article 23(4), "[e]veryone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests," my Middle-Eastern students absorbed the Universal Declaration's "spirit of brotherhood," the Chinese students were exposed to a broader concept of human freedom, that Italian woman carried a sack of cash for Human Rights Defenders, Wael Kheir spent time in prison for manifesting his uncle's vision, and the wretched of the earth have placed their case before this Human Rights regime flavored with the dreams of Western Civilization—all of them, indeed, all of humanity, face a horrifying prospect.

Both the current U.S. administration, which has flouted Human Rights, and the coming one, which disdains them, have put a torch to universal principles Americans have looked up to as a guiding testament.

On this 78^th Human Rights Day, we are on the brink. Human Rights cannot continue for anyone unless we shore them up for all. But Human Rights are not just a shield of mutual forbearance; they are the grail of humanity’s quest for a just world.

Palestine and Israel: Give to all their daily bread

What is Palestine, now exploding at the Gaza/Israeli frontier? It is a crossroads of three continents. There a braided river of Canaanites, Philistines, Samaritans, Jebusites, Jews and more have been interbreeding and religiously converting for millennia. They also bear traces of succeeding empires: Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Tartar, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, British, and Zionist. Much about the place persists, however, unchanging as flatbread from an ancient taboon oven. That’s Palestine.
 
Like flatbread, resistance to empire is ingrained by legendary struggles: of Maccabees, of Fedayeen, of that rebel Yeshua himself. To Palestinians, Zionists from Europe had no more right to colonize Palestine and impose apartheid as Brits and Boers did in South Africa. Nor, for that matter, as Europeans to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and thrive off African sweat.
 
Americans now lament our conquests and mitigate our victims’ modes of resistance by recalling our own crimes. Did Natives wipe out whole white families and mutilate blue-coated corpses at Little Big Horn? Well, we massacred women and children at Wounded Knee, spurred the Trail of Tears, kidnapped Native children, robbed Native lands and resources, and were faithless in all treaties with First Peoples.
 
When it comes to Palestinians, we disregard a comparable past. Geopolitical exigencies, media cowardice, political opportunism, and incessant Zionist propaganda have combined to devalue Palestinian human rights and demonize advocacy in their defense.
 
While powerful states concoct solutions based on self-interest, the ongoing Naqba, or catastrophe that began with the terror-driven 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians to create a majority-Jewish Israel, continues. Since 1967, Israel has imposed the longest military occupation in history, blockading Gaza, executing journalists—including American—killing hundreds of mostly peaceful Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza/Israeli perimeter, rigging a court system to forbid Palestinians from building or improving homes, demolishing thousands of homes built despite that rigging, proliferating illegal settlements, protecting settler violence (including destruction of ancient olive trees), building giant walls on Palestinian territory, imposing checkpoints impeding normal movement, imprisoning children without due process, frustrating every non-violent protest by Palestinians, and maintaining what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem call the “crime of apartheid.”
 
Like the Israeli occupation of Palestine, refugee camps that house 1.5 million Palestinians across the region are unsustainable. Bourj el-Barajne, the peaceful and well-run Palestinian camp in Lebanon where my spouse and I befriended a loving family, now shelters thousands of Syrian refugees. Longing for their human rights of return after seventy-five years in crowded camps breeds desperation and bitterness.
 
B’Tselem kept score of the killings from year 2000 to last month: 1,330 Israelis, 10,649 Palestinians. I am horrified by any notion that Israelis should suffer as the Palestinians do, as in the wanton bloodletting by Hamas a few weeks ago. My Palestinian and Jewish friends alike are weeping. Both sides must know: what flew in bygone Jericho is now proscribed by international law.
 
Tragically, instead of recoiling from the primrose path of unconditional aid and support for Israel, U.S. politicians are doubling down on a road to hell as Israel doubles down on war crimes. U. S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken quickly replaced his tweet on X, “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks,” with boilerplate “Israel has the right to defend itself.” “[I]t’s time to be cruel,” declared Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Knesset member Ariel Kallner called for a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza Israel, denying them water, food, and fuel. Israel is bombing apartment buildings, mosques, refugee camps, schools, clinics, crops, and hospitals in Gaza, according to B’Tselem.
 
Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza, including those hospitalized, in incubators, old, or disabled, to abandon northern Gaza within 24 hours and head to the unsafe south, an aggravated “forcible transfer.” Relentless bombing has now killed over 9,000 Gazans, almost 3800 of them children, all named by Hamas and verified by AP, Save the Children, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Al Jazeera, and your own eyes. These are clear war crimes, punishable by the International Criminal Court. Stats current 11/3/2023.
 
It's time to end the age of emperors and colonists who treat indigenous subjects as barbarians unworthy of human rights. We must insist that our politicians be bold and reject the illegal proclamations and actions of Israeli leaders. Demand a cease-fire on all sides and the release all hostages. Give to all, Jews and Palestinians alike, their daily bread, their equal and inalienable human rights from the river to the sea.

A Labor Day Message: The Hammer of Solidarity

Labor Day is a time to remember the value of work and the best tool in labor’s toolbox: Solidarity. Fair wages, dignity on the job, security for our families—and these days—even democracy itself depend on that Hammer of Solidarity. But Solidarity has been taking a beating from all sides recently, deformed by fear and distrust. The head’s been dislodged by callout culture and the handle gouged by resentment. Mostly these harms come from outside, sometimes by those with good intentions, but often by those determined to destroy us. When we parrot their calls, however, it is we who harm ourselves.

Callout culture relies largely on commercial and social media to convert real or perceived grievances into a cancellation campaign. There’s no due process, no proportionate penalty, and no quality of mercy in this form of justice. While some say it impowers the powerless, it is, in fact, a dis-empowering distraction, focusing on individuals rather than systems, substituting divisive cheap shots for the enormous efforts required to organize the working class. Think about the arduous campaign of a previous generation of radicals to spread industrial unionism throughout the auto, steel, and mining industries in the first half of the last century.

“Divide and rule” has always been the way conquerors and corporations protect power and profits. Hence, corporate media is happy to promote this sort of divisive “empowerment.”

Fortunately, there is push back against such a detour from real organizing. For example, the veteran African American feminist Lorretta Ross has promoted “calling in,” “a callout” she explains, “done with love and respect.”

The powerful who abuse their station and influence should still be called out, but callout culture often targets those with no real power and relies on the exploiter to enforce its cancel campaigns.

Recently, liberal media has begun to pay attention to Lorretta Ross’s message, but they minimize the progressive nature of her arguments. They neglect to mention what she says about the far more significant cancellation of progressive and labor voices and the way cancel culture is exaggerated by the corporate far right to promote resentment.

How many activists and union leaders do you see interviewed on Public Television? How many thousands of workers are fired illegally—canceled—every year for union activity? How many non-union “at will” employees are terminated for somehow offending the boss? Don’t expect to see it on the Six O‘Clock News, much less Fox News.

Now, I worked for three decades at Chrysler’s Newark Assembly Plant (NAP) in Delaware and was a member (and sometimes officer) in UAW Local 1183. In our plant we had men, women, whites, browns, Italians, Blacks, gays, trans, Christians, Muslims, guys who wore the Stars and Bars on their backs, and left-wingers like me. Not that there were not tensions sometimes, but by and large we worked peacefully side-by-side on the assembly line, partied together at social functions, and swung that hammer of solidarity together on the picket line. The callout crowd would have been outraged by how one African American trans sister was known affectionately as “Sweet Thang,” and one of the few Jews in the plant was nick-named “A-rab.” A woman we dubbed Sarge would have reacted to sexual harassment with a knuckle sandwich, not a tweet. That’s not to say that we should not have been more sensitive, and we were in more formal situations, but shop talk around machines that could rip your head off tended to be as brutal as that welding gun pelting your skin with white-hot slag.

Those tensions that we expressed insensitively at times are now weaponized by the most dangerous, undemocratic, and anti-union forces in American history.

In the name of Solidarity, we need to think twice before taking their poisoned bait.

Just as Loretta Ross warns us not to call out those on our same class level, we should be wise to those in the far-right media who call out our class siblings for perceived advantages.

Take the reduction in student debt just accomplished. The far right claims this is a favor to the bourgeois elite. If that were true, I would resent it, too, just as I resent the $987,237 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans forgiven for Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, who tweeted regarding the student loans, “Asking plumbers and carpenters to pay off the loans of Wall Street advisors and lawyers isn’t just unfair. It’s also bad policy.”

Does he hear himself?

Sorry, Mike, plumbers and carpenters take out student loans, too, along with freight haulers, medical technicians, home care workers, and physical therapists. As Jim Tankersley notes, “the people eligible for debt relief are disproportionately young and Black. And they are concentrated in the middle band of Americans by income, defined as households earning between $51,000 and $82,000 a year.” The cost of the program is offset by Medicare savings in reduced drug prices, while PPP (only a quarter of which actually supported jobs that would otherwise have disappeared) came out of the taxpayer’s pockets and was rife with fraud. Note that since Ronald Reagan, government support for social goods like college education has plummeted, exploding the cost of enrollment—eighteen times at the University of Delaware since the early 60s, when I first attended.

And it is social goods that the fake pro-worker ultra-right politicians are after, such as social security, collective bargaining, and—spoiler alert—taxing the billionaire class.

Now, both liberals and their ultra-right adversaries are responsible for caving in to (Libs) or coddling (Repubs) capitalists in the de-industrialization of America and shipping our jobs overseas. Recent climate legislation, however, is reversing this trend, in tech production and infrastructure, not just brain work. The ultra-right fought this legislation, as well as every other bill proposed by the current administration and meant to help the American people, and they lie about climate change in the face of thousand-year-record droughts and floods.

It is the working class, of course, that drives progressive change in America, not capitalists or their politician enablers. Union drives are sweeping the nation, from Starbucks to Amazon to the unionized auto industry, re-energized by the drive to sweep out the corrupt leaders who negotiated the two-tier wage structure. Talk about a means for the suits to stoke resentment!

On the wall of our old union hall, there used to be a painting, Arsenal of Democracy, representing the role of industrial labor in fighting European fascism and defending American democracy. Now we have “semi-fascists” at the gates, baiting the working class with the poison of resentment, covert and overt racism, and lies.

Don’t spread the bait. When social media memes get you steaming with resentment, consider who that resentment serves and what class sibling it scapegoats. Safeguarding Solidarity safeguards our heritage and honor. This Labor Day, let us cherish our Hammer of Solidarity: “It’s the hammer justice / It’s the bell of freedom / It’s the song about love between / Our brothers and our sisters / All over this land.” (“If I Had a Hammer,” Lee Hays and Pete Seeger)

Disarming Tome of Trans Childhood

My Rainbow (Koala Penguin Random House, 2020)

by Trinity and DeShanna Neal

Illustrated by Art Twink

DeShanna Neal has crafted a disarming and instructive tale about trans kids, specifically, her daughter and collaborator in the tome, Trinity.

The whole issue does need disarming, having been heartlessly weaponized by capitalists and their allies sowing fear from a commercialized pulpit. As well, folks of a certain age like me need instruction, old dogs that we are, tripped up by pronouns.

With beautiful illustrations by Art Twink, the story opens in the living room of Trinity’s African American family. Trinity, a child with autism, sooths herself—DeShanna calls Trinity “her” and “she”—by stroking the soft pelt of the family’s pet pig, Peter Porker. But Trinity is troubled. She sees herself (identifies as?) a trans girl, so, she informs Mom, she wishes she had long hair.

Now, in the adult world, this suggests a host of fraught issues: about Black hair, about gendered hair lengths, about living with a host of other marginalized traits.

The reader, as well as Trinity, is quickly put at ease as DeShanna navigates these issues with the equanimity of a Buddhist—DeShanna is a Buddhist, by the way—and the tenderness of a loving mother. “We are all a little different from one another,” she tells here daughter. “You’re a beautiful rainbow.” As much as Trinity wants long hair, however, “it made her itchy when it was growing out,” Mom reports. Still, says wise Mom, “Trinity knew herself best of all. And if she said she needed long hair, she NEEDED long hair!”

Exactly how our happy ending unfolds, I’ll let the reader buy the book, but the final page says, “When each of your colors has space to shine, you light up the whole sky.”

Incidentally, DeShanna’s book has been banned in Texas, home of nation-wide schoolbook cancelling for decades. The enormous number of library and schoolbooks cancelled by a few right-wing activists in Texas—the dominant market in the USA—makes the small number of works some progressives have challenged pale into near insignificance. All the same, as a socialist writer and publisher, I think the cancelling tends to skirt due process, validate corporate and state censorship, and favor calling out over organizing the multiracial, multi-gendered working class.

And DeShanna’s work deals only with a mother’s wise and compassionate response to her trans-identifying daughter’s wishes for long hair. It’s not about medical treatments, about which, in the non-fiction world, DeShanna has been a champion. Texas attempts to deny the mere reality of a trans-childhood, lest it become socially contagious, a claim made in a recent paper by Lisa Littman called “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” Littman interviewed only the confounded parents of trans teens, not trans teens themselves, and not trans teens driven from their families by such confounded parents, teens rendered homeless, sexually exploited, suicidal.

Now, Delaware’s big-hearted author DeShanna Neal is nationally celebrated as an activist, having advocated for trans-inclusive policies in the Red Clay Consolidated School District’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (D.E.I) Committee.

Haters often try to obscure the working-class-based intersectional solidarity in such activism. Pink-washing corporations often implement D.E.I programs for good P.R. and lawsuit-avoidance while continuing to funnel campaign support to fascists and LBGTQ-plus-phobes to fight unions and corporate taxes.

As DeShanna puts it in her campaign literature, “Currently, a conservative vocal minority and multi-millionaire corporations dominate the conversation in Dover. I believe in the power of individuals speaking for themselves.”

Did I forget to tell you DeShanna is running for office in Delaware Representative District 13, covering Elsmere? She hopes to replace House Majority Whip Rep. Larry Mitchell, a former police officer opposed to police accountability legislation and protections for the most basic human rights for people without housing.

Having graduated from Concord High-School (go Raiders!), Deshanna holds a master’s degree and is endorsed by Progressive Democrats of Delaware, the Working Families Party, Moms Demand Action/Gun Sense Legislation, and Delaware Democratic Socialists of America.

A person with DeShanna Neal’s courage, principles, and effectiveness will be an equally effective Representative for Elsmere.

My Rainbow is available at all major book outlets, including Amazon Kindle.

To get involved in DeShanna Neal’s campaign click https://www.deshanna4district13.com.

 

Why I support One-Person-One-Vote in the upcoming UAW referendum

By Phillip Bannowsky

“AND ARE WE A FIGHTING UNION?” called UAW Vice President General Holiefield to hundreds of Chrysler’s Newark (Delaware) Assembly plant workers. The “General” no doubt expected a resounding martial response. None came. Maybe nobody in this 2007 special meeting of UAW Local 1183 workers heard him. I retired from Chrysler in 2001, but I was there.

“AND ARE WE A FIGHTING UNION?” Holifield repeated.

A few titters here and there—crickets, basically.

What, I wondered, did he expect, having come basically to shove a s**t sandwich—the two-tier wage structure—down our throats? New hires would get half-pay indefinitely.

Undeterred, Holiefield continued his pitch. The global economy was circling the drain. Detroit automakers were bleeding cash. This was only temporary. It would affect only a special class of workers, not those on our current jobs.

Having experience in local collective bargaining, I was inclined to be sympathetic. We were always squeezed between the rock of a good contract and the hard place of a shut-down. In the Q and A, I expressed my sympathy but argued that the two-tier violated UAW principles of solidarity and was contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23, paragraph 2: “Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.”

Turns out that Holliefield did not exactly abide with that principle when he took the lion’s share of some 3.5 million dollars in bribes doled out to UAW officials by Fiat Chrysler Auto (FCA) and laundered through the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center (NTC). Since the capitulation, the UAW International Executive Board (IEB) was serving itself up ever move lavish vacations and gifts with union funds.

Now ten UAW officials, including two former presidents, have been sentenced for corruption, and the Union barely escaped a federal take-over by signing a consent decree (CD) agreeing to a membership-wide referendum on whether to continue electing our national leadership by convention delegates or do it by an all-member one-person-one-vote (1P1V) system. Essentially, claim advocates of 1P1V, “To stifle dissent, the AC has bribed, pressured and intimidated convention delegates and their locals to force them to vote for their candidates.”

I am not inclined to doubt it.

UAW members should be receiving their ballots on October 19. Still, some members have fallen off (or been dropped off) the union's LUIS information sharing application. Ballots must be received by November 29, 2021.

An independent monitor is in charge of this process, and members should contact them or their local union if they don't get a ballot, although some locals have been less than responsive.

All sides agree that a lack of transparency and accountability has led to this disaster. But there is a third factor that the sides do not agree on: the stranglehold on the UAW by the Administration Caucus, which was founded in the late forties by UAW pioneer Walter Reuther.

Walter and his brother Victor were both members of the Socialist Party and part of a broad coalition of progressives who built the UAW. It made sense that those organizers should make sure that new leaders should share the social vision of its founders.

I chanced to run into the son of an early UAW VP at a bar in Cape Cod, and he told me how it worked in the old days. “My dad had to ask a union leader if he could run for steward. Dad was a smart guy with a college degree, and he said OK, but most of his constituents were—let us say—not Jewish, he explained, and would be unlikely to vote for a Jew. On election day, the leader ran up to him, profusely apologizing that they had misspelled his name on the ballot. Now it looked not-Jewish, and he won.” Such shenanigans might seem understandable: Why should prejudice among new union members trump solidarity?

And indeed, the UAW system won us great pay, benefits, defined-benefit pensions, and a modicum of due process dealing with management.

So, when I began working for Chrysler in 1969, I was able to enjoy these benefits due to some hard bargaining and costly strikes.

At the same time, the working conditions were appalling. There were contaminants and crushing dangers everywhere. Some folks roasted between paint ovens while sloshing toxic solvents over car bodies and themselves. A man working in a pit near me was crushed to death by an overhanging fixture moving down the line. Some foremen were just plan nasty or incompetent buffoons—unnecessarily, because some were decent guys. Maybe two women in a shop of 300. Few foremen were Black, and all were men. The highest-ranking Black employee was a safety manager who sold safety shoes and was there to take a fall when disaster struck. And it was pure, numbing drudgery. We were treated like dumb children because it was dumbbell work.

Despite his social conscience, Reuther's Administration Caucus was built to forestall rivals. And his unionism tended toward what’s called business unionism. Focus on economics and let the corporations manage. Reuther referred to auto factories as “gold-plated sweatshops.”

Still, Reuther took progressive social positions. He supported the Civil Rights movement. He opposed nuclear energy. But he could not control what others would do with the Administration Caucus after he was killed in a plane crash in 1970.

When Leonard Woodcock took over as UAW president, he fired the anti-nuke staff and began hobnobbing with the corporate elite. He became a diplomat after Doug Frazer took over the UAW presidency.

Frazer confronted a great turning point in the labor movement when the capitalists went on the

offensive. Frazer had joined the Labor-Management Group, set up under the Nixon administration to seek cooperative solutions to labor-management problems. But then Frazer saw the light and quit in 1978, warning of “a one-sided class war." He declared, "I would rather sit with the rural poor, the desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose goal is profit and whose hearts are cold."

Our contracts had been improving dramatically up to this period. We were up to 12 days paid personal leave each year, in addition to our holidays, sick days, and supplemental unemployment benefits during model change and other layoffs. But then came a series of strategic attacks on the better union contracts. A fiscal crisis hit New York City in 1978, and a special board dominated by financial bigwigs like Felix Rohatyn “negotiated” concessions with city unions, all as part of a “rescue plan.” The next year, Chrysler was facing bankruptcy, and another special board concocted a rescue plan entailing dumping those personal days and exacting a loan from union members in the form of delayed pay. Rohatyn had advised on this rescue, as well. The “one-sided class war” that Dough Frazer feared was being won by the one side fighting it. In 1979 union membership was at its peak. It has plummeted ever since.

I wrote a poem about this disaster called “The Crisis at Chrysler, 1979”:

 

An economic system’s in disarray and fast decline,

And Chrysler Corporation has the sickest bottom line

But that doesn’t say

That Chrysler can’t pay

                                    When you calculate the kickback:

 

While the bankers, executives, lawyers and ad agents

Get interest and rents, bribes, and dividend payments,

It’s crack that whip

And here’s your pink slip

                                    For Joe and Sally Sixpack.

 

Since that fateful year, UAW membership has declined from 1.5 million to 400 thousand.

I entered union politics during the 70’s when an SDS comrade and I joined up with some African American brothers to challenge the sitting local president. He was part of the Green Slate caucus that dominated our local and was a pipeline to the Administration Caucus.

The Green slate had much to admire. They were very diverse, they were mostly very capable, and their rough and tumble tactics can be partially excused by the rough and tumble realities of working-class life and confronting the boss. Management is always trying to take away everything you’ve won, and you get hard representing your constituents, and you will kick hard at anyone who tries to challenge you politically.

Still, there were few Blacks in skilled trades, safety was pathetic, and we were a bunch of radicals who wanted to bring back that socialist vision largely abandoned since Reuther.

I decided to run for shop steward and won two votes.

By 1980 we had a new caucus, The Progressive Movement. For several years we passed out flyers on safety, women's rights, labor history, affirmative action in skilled trades, internationalism, and socialism. In 1982, I won an upset election for Committeeperson.

At that time, the UAW might have been autocratic but, by-and-large, it was not corrupt. "Spend it, don't steal it," was what one international rep told me, regarding the perks of office. What corruption I saw was a petty crook here or there: a former committeeman who was a loan shark, another officer who was said to be a company plant. Some skimming of interest from a union fund we were told was not interest-bearing. Cheating on skilled trades exams. 300-dollar monthly stipends for committeepersons—until I was elected, that is. And management played favorites with their patsies, resolving a train of grievances for offering the wrong guy overtime with money damages, while telling the rest of us, “we’ll make it up next time.”

Oddly, the international union broke up the caucuses in the locals around 1984, calling joint slates “undemocratic.”

    I am told that delegates to the national convention are threatened and shouted down if they don’t support the anointed AC candidates or are promised jobs with the International for going along. I am not inclined to doubt it. The only time anyone outside the AC was elected to the IEB was when Jerry Tucker was elected as Director Region 5 in 1986. This, however, was only after the National Labor Relations Board threw out the first election because the AC had cheated.

   But would AC officials sell us out with a s**t sandwich for a bribe? I would have doubted it then, but now we know.
        The problem is we can’t leave it to Administration Caucus to clean up their act. As reported in a 2019 Detroit News article, two former UAW communications directors, Rev. Peter Laarman and Frank Joyce, “broke what they called an ‘institutional code of silence’ to give a scathing rebuke of the UAW leadership . . . [and] called for the resignations of the UAW's entire international executive board. . . . All of them. Senior staff assisting current officers and board members are themselves 'see no evil, hear no evil,' enablers. They too should resign."

This is not to say every local or regional official is culpable. I am forever grateful for my local president who supported my leadership of a forty-organization coalition that worked to restore voting rights to former felons in Delaware. However, even Laarman and Joyce admit that, like frogs in a gradually warming pot of corruption, they were slow to hop out.

In the debate held by the UAW Monitor on October 7 of this year, Administrative Caucus arguments were weak. They complained about all the old people speaking and claimed most UAW members don't even know who the UAW President is, much less how the union should be run. Their strongest arguments relied on the UAW’s tremendous record before the decline. See for yourself at UAW Monitorship Webinar.

By the way, the idea put forward by Administration Caucus defenders that outside money (like Fiat Chryser’s!) could influence a 1P1V election is dead on arrival. The Consent Agreement holds that if 1P1V is chosen by the rank and file in the referendum, the manner in which the 1P1V election will be carried out will be negotiated between the Monitor and the present UAW IEB. Supporters of 1P1V like Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) have called on the monitor to impose spending limits and reporting requirements. If the current IEB is worried about outside money, they can support those limits and requirements, too.

The UAW is great because we had great founding principles of solidarity, we had great leaders, and we had a rank and file brave and bold enough to seize the plants until the Big Three accepted the union. It will take an enormous effort to rebuild the UAW. Only the rank and file can do it. We have an opportunity and a duty to recharge the labor movement and to do that, we need to step up and select a new leadership ourselves.

 

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,

Greater than the might of armies, multiplied a thousand-fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old

For the union makes us strong.

Solidarity forever!

—Ralph Chapman, “Solidarity Forever,” UAW Anthem

Booklist Out, Books Back, Jacobo Published

    Broken Turtle Books is coming back, but Broken Turtle Booklist is set to be retired, with one last featured author, ME.

    A confession, Broken Turtle Booklist was a great idea: to catalogue all Delaware authors in one place and feature specific authors from time to time, but it was an overly ambitious project. In the meantime, Broken Turtle Books, a publishing company created by the editors of Dreamstreets, gradually stopped publishing, and I assumed the assets and debts, roughly a wash, but for a few ISBNs. With the publication of my latest work, Jacobo the Turko: a novel in verses, I have revived the company. I intend to revive promotion of works we published previously, such as Steven Leech’s Untime and Douglas Morea’s Letters to You, as well as works by other authors in the Dreamstreets collective, such as Franetta McMillians latest novel, The Hololounge of the Mundane. A new website, Broken Turtle Books, will serve that purpose, but it is now “under construction.” The old Broken Turtle Booklist is still up, with my brooding mug soon to cast its shadow over the homepage.

    As for my latest opus, Jacobo the Turko explores the braided rivers of human kinship by tracing the misadventures of Jacobo Bitar, a young Ecuadorian of blended heritage and naïve dreams.

    With snippets of news, scholarship, and a host of classical and experimental forms, this hybrid, tragicomic novel shows how Jacobo, an Ecuadorian youth of Indigenous and Lebanese parentage, lands summer work at a Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Pizza joint, loses his pay and passport, cuts wings at a Georgetown poultry plant, scrambles to evade ICE, is rescued by an African American artist of Wilmington, bakes donuts on the graveyard shift at Dunkin’, and gets nabbed and deported to Lebanon (where he’s never been), and is ultimately jailed at Guantánamo.

    Jacobo earned me the 2017 Delaware Division of the Arts Established Artist Fellowship in Literature: Poetry.

    For stylistic inspiration, I drew on the works of Nicolás Guillén, Eduardo Galeano, William Carlos Williams, Rita Dove, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The more I think of it, however, I realize how all sorts of bad actors intrude on my esthetics—you know, Pound, Eliot, and such, maybe Keats, maybe that ad copywriter Don Blanding’s cheap encomiums to Waikiki beach, hula dancers, and coconuts I read in the fifth grade when my Navy pilot dad was stationed in Hawaii.

     Check out my webpage for more on Jacobo and other works, including videos of my performances of and at this and that.

    

RBG: Don't Despair; Defy!

Ruth Bader Gins-
burg’s passing is a good time to choose action over despair.

Like others, I felt her death as a tightening of the right’s death-grip on the country, a shrinking of what’s left to save, an impulse to give in to Trumptopian Covid depression.

But no.

No! 

Hell, no!

Tomorrow I do something, with no time to worry it’s not enough or not good enough. If we must rage against the dying of the light, let us rage with action. Even if it feels feeble and feckless, at least it’s defiant. For example:

Register and Vote. For Biden, of course. Assistance can be found in Facebook, or Steven Colbert’s State-specific videos on registering, requesting absentee ballots, and voting early in Covid America. In short, have a plan.

Multiply your vote with Vote Tripling, a personal approach much superior to texts from strangers. Get three friends to get three friends to commit to voting, and then remind them as the election nears. Three times three times three ad victoria.

Adopt a battleground state and help turn out targeted new and/or infrequent voters, a proven and efficient method of boosting turnout of folks on our side where it matters most. Crooked Media can guide you.

Call your Senators now and demand they REFUSE to consider any Supreme Court Justice until the new president is inaugurated. Indivisible makes it easy.

Demonstrate for causes like Black Lives Matter with discipline to fit the times.

Oh, yeah, and if you got it, give money. I suspect those texts from strangers are telling you how.

Every conversation these days tends to fall off down that black hole of Trump-sickness. As soon as he comes up, say, “I am doing A, B, and C, about it. What will you promise to do?

Optimism is sometimes defined as a belief that things will turn out better than what’s probable and thereby improve one’s chances. Antonio Gramsci spoke about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the spirit.” He wrote that from a fascist prison, and you are not there, yet. So, take heart, defy the odds, and fight back!

If you got a better idea, tell it, spread it, and, especially, DO it.

When I was pessimistic about you sharing pics of that sad kitten, none of you did. I am betting that many of you will share this one, now.