Fight Ignorance not Immigrants: Ethnic Studies Week October 1-7

Fight Ignorance not Immigrants: Ethnic Studies Week October 1-7 Fight Ignorance not Immigrants: Ethnic Studies Week October 1-7
Dateline June 21 2010: The first day of summer looking back on a springtime of outrage.
There was much to be outraged about during the spring of 2010: Twenty nine miners died at work in West Virginia, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to take lives here and there, oil spilled and spilled and spilled into the gulf of Mexico, President Obama signed a law increasing the severity of punishment for government whistle blowers, just as brave soldiers unveiled truths of massacres by U.S. troops, Israel attacked and killed people on a flotilla bringing goods to Gaza, successful Tea party candidate Rand Paul declared that the 1964 Civil Rights, and 1990 Americans with Disabilities Acts represented excessive government intervention, while the governor of Arizona governor passed a law making it legal to racially profile brown people.
Then on May 21, the Arizona governor signed another law making ethnic studies in the public schools illegal and just a week later the Texas State Board of Education passed their new social studies standards and , it seemed to me, these were the outrages that connected all the other outrages together. For if we can’t learn about the lives of people who are not white, if we don’t learn about the history of mine workers and their struggle for safe working conditions, if we don’t learn about wars and the courageous whistle blowers past and present , if teachers can not address issues of the day that directly impact the students, like immigration, race disparities in health, employment, and education, if students don’t learn about how social change happens, if teachers and students are muzzled, if learning about critical race theory and Chicano, African American, Asian American, American Indian studies is a privilege only available to college students, if a tiny group of right wing zealots somewhere in Texas can tell the nation’s children what they can and cannot know, if critical thinking remains an elite pursuit, then blood and oil and hatred will continue to spill. We need to stop and talk and study and think and talk some more about where we are going.
So let’s start the conversation. Join the 155 (and growing) group of educators from around the United States who have come together to let people like Gov Jan Brewer (and unfortunately she has clones in local government around the country)know that if you try to ban ethnic studies , it will spread. We have proclaimed October 1-7 Ethnic Studies Week. All over the country, in schools and communities, people will engage in what would amount to civil disobedience in the Arizona public schools. They will be talking about the issues and people censored by the Texas State Board of Education. To see who we are go to the initiators page of the website ethnicstudiesweekoctober1-7.org You can interact with this website, reporting plans for the week, providing testimony, resources, etc.

Lou Dobbs IMMIGRATION, ECONOMY, WAR, RACE

He speaks for the “declining middle class” -- that’s all of us from the well-off to the low income, who have seen our health care and education, fuel and food costs rise and our wages decline. He is a White reporter who embraces Black correspondents and policy makers of diverse political stripes. He’s anti-war, anti-free trade, anti-corporate, anti-government corruption.

And most of all, he’s anti-immigrant.

Anti- “illegal” immigrant, anti-“alien”, anti-non-English speaking, anti-“people who sneak cross our southern border”. Furthermore, he wants you to know we are in a CRISIS. The “illegal aliens” penetrating our Southern border are the lynch pin. They are at the core of everything else that ails us. The message is implicit. The “alien” who comes in after hours, who works behind the kitchen door, the one who packages the meat and picks the potatoes for pennies on the dollar; they are the ones to blame for war, corporatism, corruption.

This is a fascist message, clear and simple. It focuses on real issues facing a broad sector of society, unites people who were previously divided and provides them all with a close but alien scapegoat. The previously upper-middle class, join the poor in the “declining middle”; Black and White, now all “Americans”. All of us fed up with this criminal war, disgusted with corrupt politicians and the corporations that support them, are susceptible to his message.

I am searching for a metaphor. Is it like the doctor who convinces you that you are addicted to nicotine and prescribes heroine to kick the habit? The long distance runner who sees they are falling behind and so decides to run back to the starting line with all deliberate speed? Is he showing hungry dogs how their masters gorge and then skinning and dangling the pup that eats the least, in front of the hungry canines? Anyway you look at it the American people are desperate for a cure, they want to win at something, they are hungry. They are willing to attack the weakest link that holds their coalition together. They are ready to take decisive action, even if the action they take moves them precisely in the wrong direction. Lou Dobbs knows this.

One of the first political awakening moments for me was when I was nine years old and sitting on the porch swing next door, in North Carolina in 1967, hearing my southern white neighbors talk about how Wallace was the man for the little guy. I knew that in our house the man was a racist. So how could he provide hope for the little guy next door?

Around the same time I started to talk to my dad about Hitler, and how he was able to convince the German people that the Jews among them were the cause of their very real social and economic ills. My dad was born a Jew in Germany the same year Hitler came to power. I thought he ought to know. But he didn’t, and I’m still trying to figure it out.

I still don’t know. Lou Dobbs of CNN does, and he has the microphone. I just have this blog that no one reads.

ECONOMY AND WAR : Its the Economy OR the War!

There they go again! All those politicians, and pundits, pollsters, and, (as my friend Alan would say) presstitutes. They are all in this together sending us one mass message:

THE ECONOMY AND THE WAR HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER.

Apparently we, the public, have switched concerns. We are no longer worry about the war because now we are worried about the economy.

Well this may be so, but the mind manipulation coup here is to convince us that we must not connect the issues.

So lets see how well you have been brain washed. Which one of these issues is the war and which one is the economy? Remember CHOOSE ONE. If you choose both your answer will be nullified.

1. The young man or woman in your life signs up for duty in Iraq because there are no jobs at home.

WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________

2. The young veteran in your life is unable to find or afford care for his/her PTSD.

WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________

3. Despite a multi-trillion dollar budget with expanding military expenditures your elementary school has cancelled after school soccer due to lack of funds. You cannot afford childcare because your health premiums went up January 1st. Your child stays at home alone.

WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________

4. You lose your home due to a predatory lender jacking up your mortgage. The government tells you it would be unfair to provide relief for people who try to live beyond their means. Meanwhile they pay private contractors like Blackwater inflated fees for services that include murder and torture. You wonder who is the criminal, and who is irresponsible with their/our treasure.

WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________

Reader: I have to go now. Please add your own test questions! Lets connect the dots and not let them blindside us into not seeing the causes of our hard times, and the true cost of war.


Anne Winkler-Morey Ph.D is an historian and itinerent professor. blog: " People's Living History"

MIDTOWN GLOBAL MARKET: The Global is Local

Coats, hats sweaters, scarves, snow pants, purses, packages of new purchases are piled high on the tiny table. Outside it is eleven below zero, before the wind-chill is factored in. In this inner city neighborhood Latinos and Africans and African Americans make up 65 percent of the population and European Americans, Asian American and Native Americans sharing the remaining third. Thawing out on this make-shift dance-floor in the window corner of the Midtown Global Market last Sunday, were small children and grandparents, professional dancers and first-timers, a panoply of body types, ages, races and ethnicities, gathered for free Salsa lessons.

The Midtown Global Market is not just a colorful place to come and chase the winter blues away. It is sweet revenge, the lemonade from lemons, the silver lining after a horrific storm, a picking up the scraps left by the ravages of globalization and making something beautiful out of them.

The Sears Tower was a mammoth department store and one of nine regional catalog mail order centers in the country back when Sears was the primary source for department store merchandise. Located adjacent to the corner of Lake Street and Chicago Avenue, in the center of South Minneapolis, it opened in 1928, employed 2000 people at its peak and was the central shopping site for everything from clothing to car parts for thousands of neighbors near and far. My spouse, who grew up in small towns in Wisconsin in the 1960s, remembers the excitement of coming to Sears on Lake Street once a year for major purchases. I bought expandable bras there over eighteen years ago, while pregnant with my now high-school senior. In 1993, one year before Sears moved its operations, we became a home owners in south Minneapolis and purchased an oven from the Lake Street store.

Sears left the Phillips neighborhood in South Minneapolis some fourteen years ago. They traded up, moving to the Mall of America in Bloomington where they could attract suburban shoppers who make substantially more than the residents of Phillips, where the average annual wage is $13,000. When Sears left, the neighborhood was already depressed. Since the start of the cocaine epidemic in the mid 1980s the primary economic activities here have been street drugs and women’s bodies.

In the 1980s, if you remember, the Reagan administration was funding mercenary forces and death squads in Central America, some with drug money that poisoned urban centers like the Phillips neighborhood in South Minneapolis. Million of refugees of those Central American wars walked across hot deserts to escape, and some of them ended up in the South Minneapolis. Meanwhile, an ocean away U.S. arms manufacturers, like perhaps the Honeywell corporation that had its national headquarter in the Phillips neighborhood, reaped billions selling weapons to warring factions in East Africa while other corporation reaped subsoil and agricultural profits from the region. When the Somali government dissolved into anarchy in the early 90s Somalians poured into refugee camps in Kenya. A group was eventually settled in the Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis and soon after thousands more of their compatriots joined them. I’ve heard it said that there are more Somalis in near-South Minneapolis than in Mogadishu now, but I don’t know if that is true.

There they mixed with Native Americans from the nation’s only urban reservation, the Little Earth of United Tribes; first, second and third generation African Americans who made their way “Up North”, third, fourth, and fifth generation Netherlands and other more recent European immigrants. In the mid 1990s a combination of drought in Mexico, NAFTA and job shortages in Minnesota, created the push and pull motivations that led Mexicans from the states of Morelos, Puebla and elsewhere to immigrate to Minnesota. They joined a new wave of Hmong and other Southeast Asian immigrants who came to Minnesota in the early 2000s. Many of these most recent immigrants were attracted to the increasingly global barrio of Phillips. In 2005 the Midtown Global Market, with shops owners reflecting the diversity of the neighborhood, opened in the Old Sears Tower, now the Midtown Exchange.

The Midtown Exchange is by no means some kind of small business utopia. All kinds of corporate compromises were made to fund the project, and neighborhood input was squelched several times in the process. Its survival is dependent on corporate tax dollars from Allina and Wells Fargo, whose offices in the building provide a financial anchor. The condos that fill part of the huge complex--- built right on the Greenway-- a bike, walk and soon-to-be-trolley path that connects the chain of Lakes with the Mississippi—would a great green addition to our city were it not for the sticker price per unit . At $1400 for a one bedroom, they are far from affordable for those who currently reside in the neighborhood.

Still when coats and purses are piled high without concern for security, and strangers from all over the world join each other in this urban core to dance at high noon on an arctic Sunday in January, one can be forgiven for feeling a little bit of euphoria. In the frozen tundra, the globe strikes back….. with a dance!

TRANSNATIONAL LABOR, THEN AND NOW: Century Old IWW

Century-old Industrial Workers of the World Still Offer Prescription for World Peace

The IWW is one hundred years old this spring but its political goals are just what we need today to promote peace and justice in the world. Farmworker organizer and musician Baldemar Velasquez continues the legacy of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In 1905 the IWW founders saw themselves as an alternative to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). While the AFL generally confined itself to organizing white, male, skilled non migrant urban workers, the IWW members, or “Wobblies,” as they were dubbed, opened up their unions to women, African Americans, Mexicans, and people working temporary and “unskilled” jobs like ditch diggers and crop harvesters. While the American Federation of Labor was busy lobbying for immigration restrictions, the IWW conducted meetings in several languages, printed their publications in Spanish and English, and focused on recruiting new arrivals to the United States. The AFL organized along the lines of particular trades which made it easy for the bosses to pit one group of workers against another in a particular industry. In contrast, the IWW’s goal was to organize whole industries. The AFL put the national interests of U.S. workers above all others, but IWW promoted ONE BIG UNION, a labor federation that crossed all national borders. One century later workers face multinational corporations who use organizations like the IMF and the WTO to protect their global interests. Companies like Halliburton wave the red white, and blue to recruit soldiers to fight their battles for them, while pledging allegiance to the flag of cheap labor. One hundred years after the founding of the IWW, we need that ONE BIG UNION more than ever. Imagine if there was no place for oil companies, sneaker manufacturers, and agribusiness to go for cheaper labor; if every apple harvester from Chile to Minnesota belonged to the same labor federation; if every worker in the global soccer-ball industry carried the same union card; if every worker made a living wage, with safe and dignified working conditions; if no community was toxic-waste dumping grounds. Who would need barbed wire borders? What reason would there be to go to war? Is this a utopian pipe dream? No. In the last ten years AFL-CIO locals have been taking the first steps toward realizing this vision. They are organizing immigrant workers, with or without documents, and working with unions in other countries to build cross-border solidarity to stop runaway shops. One of the leaders of both of these progressive labor trends is Baldemar Velasquez, the president and founder of the Midwest Farm Labor Organization Committee AFL-CIO, based in Ohio. Velasquez has been working within the AFL-CIO to organize those sectors of the worker forces left to the marginalized Industrial Workers of the World 100 years ago. In addition, he is a leader of international efforts to promote labor solidarity across borders. Velasquez thinks and works locally and globally. Like the legendary IWW singer and songwriter Joe Hill, Baldemar Velasquez is a musician as well as a labor organizer. On April 9 Velasquez came to the Twin Cities to do a concert to raise funds for Centro Campesino, an organization by and for migrant workers in Southern Minnesota.Velasquez and his Aguila Negra Band sang old labor songs, Mexican folk ballads and new music of the labor and antiglobalization movements. Velasquez sprinkled stories of current struggle between his songs. His performance feeds the brain, the heart, and the soul.

COLLEGE RANKING: U.S. New and World Report Move Over:

Alternative Ranking System for Universities Shifts Priorities to Address Real Needs

Anne Winkler-Morey, W A M M Every year the conservative news magazine U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) ranks colleges and universities. Today Minnesotans are considering a "strategic positioning plan" aimed at raising the ranking of the University of Minnesota in the USNWR contest. In accordance with this occasion, we hereby inaugurate the first annual Alternative college and university ranking contest. International results will be tallied and announced later. In the meantime Minnesotans should heed this warning: The U of M's strategic positioning plan, if implemented as is, would plunge the U of M to a dangerously low spot (think triple digits) on our scale. Our Goal: We are looking for premier resource colleges and universities bold enough to tackle the world's most pressing problems, such as inequality, non-sustainability, maldistribution, and militarism. We have implemented the following measurement criteria for colleges and universities: 1. Are they financially sound? Does the community served by the institution demand "money for schools, not for war" and work to eliminate the single most wasteful and destructive drain on our education budgets-the military? Are for-profit motivated corporations funding research or does the community tax corporations and create their own research agenda? 2. Are they cooperatively managed? Do architects work with agronomists, urban planners, and educators to build cities that eliminate homelessness and hunger and provide access to mass transit and education in a manner that is sustainable for seven generations to come? Do medical researchers work hand in hand with places and people most in need of medical care to provide preventions and cures accessible to all who are afflicted? Do dancers, painters, and actors work hand in hand with educators and politicians committed to opening the doors of theaters, museums, and art curricula to reach every urban and rural community with art that genuinely reflects their realities? 3. Do they harness available brain power? Does the education institution have mechanisms in place to fully harness the knowledge of those who are experts in the problems that most acutely affect our society? For example, those who grew up without homes and people whose culture is not dominant and privileged? And people whose skin color makes them 27 times more likely to understand the inequalities of our judicial system, whose work and citizenship status makes them most acutely aware of the need for a global view of the world's problems? What about people who think differently than their teachers? What about communities where the current education system does not reach? Will people be included who best understand the need for education reform that truly leaves no child behind? 4. Do they appear to be equitable priorities? At the U of M, for example, we want to see the Rafael Espinosa School of Labor and not the Carlson School of Management have the most prestigious building on campus. We would also like to see that the building that houses the department of Chicano and American Indian Studies is fully handicappedaccessible and furnished with the best heating and cooling system, the cleanest water and the latest education technology available to students elsewhere on campus. While our final tallies will take months, today we issue the University of Minnesota this warning: The strategic positioning plan, as it is written, will plunge the U of M down in our ratings. To avoid this devastating fall in status, we suggest the following: 1. Keep General College open and expand its programs and budget. Because this is one of the programs at the U of M that addresses our brain power needs, it needs to be expanded and cloned until the entire university will, like General College, represent and serve the needs of the diverse brain power resources we have in this state. 2. Replace meaningless rhetoric with a budget and a concrete plan to make pre-K-12 education a college prep system for all in Minnesota. Eliminate deceitful rhetoric about alleged diversity and support for pre-K-12 education. Pre-K-12 education in this state has suffered horrendous budget cuts in the last five years, exacerbating education gaps between white and nonwhite, rich and poor, suburban and rural/urban students. Because the university is a land grant institution and the final stage of Minnesota's public education system, the university's strategic positioning plan must include a concrete financial plan to reverse this devastating trend. Implementing our new alternative ranking system could mean a world of change. The University of Minnesota could be not number three, not number two, but number one! May 2005: Anne Winkler-Morey is finally leaving the University of Minnesota for parts unknown, after ten years of teaching in the Chicano Studies Department.

LATIN AMERICA LEFT: Bolivians Take to the Streets Summer 2005

Bolivians Take to the Streets to Demand Fair Trade and Justice

As I write, barricades in the streets of the major cities of Bolivia, from the capital of La Paz, on the Peruvian border, to Cochabamba, in the highlands, have shut the nation down. A sea of humanity is using its bodies to stop all traffic, shut down oil wells, and prevent the government from conducting business. In doing so the protesters have toppled the presidency of Carlos Mesa and forced the resignation of the next two people in line. The people are demanding that the president of the Supreme Court assume Mesa’s position and make plans for new elections in a matter of months. So far their demands have been fulfilled. I cannot predict how events will unfold by the time you read this, but hope that this analysis will help you understand what has happened between my writing and your reading. Bolivia has the largest reserves of oil and natural gas in Latin America after Venezuela. Despite its immense natural subsoil wealth (for decades Bolivia was the world’s supplier of tin), Bolivia has not reaped the wealth of its resources. Currently foreign corporations buy the crude oil and gas, process, and sell it for seven times the price they pay Bolivia. Bolivians pay $49 a barrel for gasoline they sold to multinationals for $7. Grassroots pressure to nationalize the nation’s oil and natural gas resources have been mounting for the last five years. In early May, the Bolivian Congress passed a compromise law taxing corporations at the rate of 50 percent. President Carlos Mesa did not veto the congressional bill. Oil corporations, the U.S., and a tiny group of private elites clustered in the Eastern city of Santa Cruz and whined about the tax. Bolivian people meanwhile immediately began to mobilize protests. Led by the national labor union who were followed quickly by campesino and indigenous groups, they demanded a full nationalization of oil and natural gas resources. These demands and the militant protests of May and June 2005 should come as no surprise if we consider the following recent events: * During the election of 2002, Evo Morales with his Move toward Socialism Party (MAS) came in just 1.5 percentage points behind the winner, Sanchez de Lozada, on a platform demanding nationalization of natural gas. * In October 2003, a massive uprising removed President Sanchez de Lozada from office after he began a deal to sell natural gas to the U.S. for a pittance. Carlos Mesa became the interim president. * In a referendum in 2003 92 percent of voters said yes to nationalization. The uprising in Bolivia is also about indigenous rights. The indigenous people make up two-thirds of the population. They make up over 90 percent of those who are malnourished in Bolivia (about 70 percent of the population). In addition to nationalization of the oil and gas industries, the Aymara nation is demanding a new constitution for Bolivia. They want a Constituent Assembly that will for the first time bring indigenous people into the decision-making process in representative numbers. The Assembly would be mandated to create a new constitution for Bolivia. Unlike the Zapatistas of Mexico, the Aymara nation does not want autonomy. They want a new government for Bolivia, one based on cooperatives and local control and one that represents the culture of the majority of the population. Bolivia and the United States: Since 1990 the United States has been mired in deadly conflicts in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and East Africa while trying at the same time to impose free trade agreements and privatization campaigns on its southern neighbors. The United States has tried to use economic pressures and aid to proxy military forces (often hidden from the U.S. public or sold as an anti- drug campaign) to implement these “structural adjustments” in Latin America. The targets of privatization are not just the primary cash products like natural gas in Bolivia, but also internal necessities like health care, social security, education, water, and electricity. Bolivians engaged in a mass protest in 2000 to protect their right to water. The coalitions formed and tactics used five years ago provided an organizational starting point for the current uprising against oil and natural gas corporations. For over 105 years, the United States government has supported the interests of the petroleum industry in the region. It has threatened to cut off all aid to Bolivia if the nation’s subsoil resources are nationalized. But the U.S. public is not likely to support another war for oil. Without the Soviets to blame anymore, the United States has had to scramble to find justifications that will convince the U.S. public to support its Latin America policy. Beginning in the early 1990s, the U.S. Drug War replaced the Soviet Union as the justification for U.S. campaigns against democratic forces demanding rights in Latin America. In Bolivia drug enforcers have been poisoning the land and the farmers in the countryside in a supposed effort to stem the tide of cocaine in the U.S. Cocaleros, who are primarily indigenous farmers, have lost land and livelihood. The result has been that land ownership is increasingly in the hands of large agribusiness, and cocaine distribution in the U.S. continues. Given this reality it is no surprise that Evo Morales was able to gain widespread support demanding legalization of coca production during his 2002 campaign bid for the presidency. In this latest wave of protests the United States has found a new enemy, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. At the OAS meeting in early June 2005, U.S. Ambassador Roger Noriega proclaimed that Hugo Chavez was the mastermind behind the uprising in Bolivia. No doubt the people of Bolivia are inspired by the Venezuela revolution, as are most people working for indigenous rights and against privatization and free trade in Latin America. Noriega, however, is not talking about inspiration, but money, guns, and deals. The fact that there is no evidence of this collusion is irrelevant to the U.S. ambassador. What an old story! Those of us involved in Central America solidarity in the 1980s remember well the claim that Soviets and Cubans were the bosses of Central American campesinos. The assumption was that the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador would never think of rebelling themselves if foreign agitators did not fill their heads with false promises, slush funds, and military hardware. But some things have changed since the 1980s. Latin America is not the primary focus of U.S. policy. It is clear that there are limits to the imperial reach of the United States. Conflicts in the Eastern Hemisphere have limited U.S. resources and have allowed Latin American social movements like those in Bolivia to gain ground. I don’t know what will happen in Bolivia, but I can say the following: First, the uprising of May and June 2005 was grassroots and indigenous (in more ways then one); and second, it will not go away; and finally, the United States will try to suppress it. Depictions of Bolivian freedom fighters as terrorists, coming soon to a TV near you!