Left News and Views

Adam Turl describes the epidemic of renters who are being evicted as a result of the mortgage crisis.

http://socialistworker.org/2008/08/20/renters-and-mortgage-crisis

August 20, 2008

EVEN THOUGH it was hard, Patricia and Michael Phillips kept up on the monthly $600 rent. Both are disabled–Patricia can’t use her right arm, and Michael is in a wheel chair–and both depend on Social Security payments for their limited income.

Some renters are finding themselves evicted without warning

So they were shocked when the local sheriff’s department turned up at their front door in July and told them they were to be evicted by the end of the day. Their landlord was being foreclosed on–and even though he hadn’t been paying the mortgage for months, he had been cashing their rent checks.

Michael and Patricia phoned their adult children and their friends for help, hurriedly packed a lifetime’s worth of personal belongings into a U-Haul, and moved into Patricia’s 89-year-old father’s mobile home.

The Phillips family isn’t alone.

In Dayton, Ohio, Jimmy Jackson always paid his rent on time, but ended up homeless after his landlord’s foreclosure.

In Springfield, Ohio, Debbie Sample–out of work because of an on-the-job injury–found out she was going to be evicted. She told local reporters she had no idea how she was going to get money together for a new apartment –as she was out of work and was also about to go to the hospital for surgery.

In Las Vegas, Tresia Chesley has been chased from three apartments in less than three years, as each successive landlord has been foreclosed upon.

In San Diego, the residents at a sober-living facility for recovering alcoholics found out they were going to be evicted and that their landlord had collected $30,000 in rent but hadn’t made a single payment on the mortgage.

Aurea Ortiz got less than two weeks notice that Wells Fargo was evicting her from her $1,100-a-month two-bedroom Bridgeport, Conn., apartment.

In Henderson, Nev., constables entered a hospice and ordered everyone to vacate the premises in 24 hours–including the elderly patients attached to IV drips. Frantic health care workers arranged to move residents by ambulance, hire emergency medical care and find last-minute housing. The out of state landlord had failed to pay the mortgage or notify the hospice of the eminent eviction.

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THE FORECLOSURE crisis isn’t just impacting homeowners. Increasingly, renters find themselves put to the curb, discovering they are to be evicted with days’ notice–if that. Banks and mortgage companies are foreclosing on large numbers of rental properties–and, according to the Illinois Mortgage Bankers Association, they do not want to become landlords, as these companies feel they will be able to sell small apartment buildings more quickly if they are empty.

Although no federal agency keeps track of the figures, if local estimates and statistics bear out nationwide, the number of renters who have faced eviction since the beginning of the housing crisis could number in the hundreds of thousands. David Rothstein of the nonprofit Policy Matters Ohio (PMO) notes that studies in Ohio have shown that renters are forced from homes in 30 percent of foreclosures, and that some studies put the number as high as 60 percent.

The crisis is an epidemic in Ohio. In Cuyahoga County alone, the PMO reports a 29 percent increase in foreclosures on rental properties from 2006 to 2007.

But it isn’t just about hard-pressed Ohio. Analysts believe up to half of foreclosures in Nevada may be on apartments–because the address of the property doesn’t match the address of the owner on court documents. According to the San Diego Union Tribune, in San Diego County–which has upwards of 50 foreclosures per day–one-third to two-thirds of foreclosures may be on rental properties.

In a recent article in the Chicago Reporter, journalist Kelly Virella argues that thousands of renters in the Chicago area have likely been evicted during the course of the current housing crisis, facing unexpected and often immediate evictions when a landlord’s property is foreclosed.

As Virella aptly describes the situation, “Since the nation’s worse housing foreclosure crisis began two years ago, the octopus-like tentacles of the global mortgage industry have orchestrated the repossession of thousands of small apartment buildings in Cook County, affecting thousands of renters who live there.”

In 2006 and 2007, 3,551 two- to six-unit apartment buildings in Cook County were foreclosed on.

As with the broader crisis, Black neighborhoods face the brunt when it comes to renters. Two of every three foreclosed small apartment buildings, Virella reports, were in majority Black neighborhoods. Of 11 community areas studied with more than 100 small apartment building foreclosures in 2006 and 2007–all were on the predominantly minority South and West Sides of the city.

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THE HARDSHIPS on renters go beyond the “hassle” of finding a new apartment. First of all, as the housing crisis drives former homeowners into rentals, some people are becoming multiple victims.

As the PMO’s Rothstein told reporters, “A lot of these people, it is not the first foreclosure they face. A lot of families that we’ve seen had been foreclosed on the home they used to own and then became renters and now their landlord has been foreclosed upon.”

While a few states require notifying renters of an impending foreclosure and eviction, most do not. Tenants often find out they must move when the sheriff appears at their door, creating an expensive scramble to find a new home, often with higher rent because of the short-notice.

Renters usually don’t get their security deposits back, and they have often paid months of rent that the landlord has pocketed, even though he or she is no longer paying the mortgage. Many evicted tenants end up moving in with relatives or friends.

Landlords aren’t just failing to pay their mortgages. The Chicago Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) told the Chicago Reporter that they have seen a substantial spike in tenants’ complaints about heat or gas being turned off after the landlord failed to pay the utilities.

Even where local laws prohibit evicting tenants, banks and mortgage companies try to bully renters into moving. Washington, D.C., prohibits evicting tenants for landlord foreclosure–but banks are known to send tenants “20-day notices” to vacate the property. Renters dealing with these evictions find themselves tangled in a bewildering web of red tape.

Due to the deregulation of the housing market and financial system, many owners don’t know who actually owns their mortgages, let alone renters. The bundling and selling of mortgages makes it increasingly hard for renters to find out just who is trying to put them on the street.

During evictions, mortgage companies and banks often contract out to other firms–usually law firms–that liaison with the local sheriff or constable to carry out the evictions.

Yet another company may be hired to physically haul a renter’s belongings out of their home. For example, the Chicago Reporter recounts the story of Tabitha–a renter in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood–who faced eviction from her brownstone apartment after her landlord failed to pay the mortgage.

Tabitha had to deal with the California-based Citi Residential Lending, her realtor’s office–Jax Realtors and REO Group–the Cook County Sheriff, and yet another company that was hired to empty her apartment, all in a vain attempt to retrieve her belongings.

She arranged with her former realtor to move her things. After waiting for two hours with a small army of friends who had come to help her move, Jax failed to show up. Tabitha sought legal help from the non-profit Legal Assistance Foundation and arranged another appointment to move. Again, Jax didn’t show up.

However, movers from another company did show up at her apartment, and began moving her things out to the street, damaging much of her property beyond repair or use.

Since the general housing crisis is far from over, it is likely that the evictions of renters will continue to rise, and such horror stories will accumulate. Already strapped for cash due to record inflation, lower-income workers who make up the bulk of renters are also among the first to be laid off during a recession.

Despite hard times, inflation and unemployment, most of these workers have managed to pay their rent month after month after month. It is absurd that they would be driven from their homes by the thousands.

It is criminal that the banks and mortgage companies–the people who created the housing crisis in the first place–are the ones doing it.

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What else to read

For further reading on how the foreclosure crisis is hitting renters, see Kelly Virella’s article in the Chicago Reporter, “A Renter’s Nightmare.” [1]

For more background on the worsening state of the economy, see Joel Geier’s “More than a recession: An economic model unravels,” [2] published in the International Socialist Review.

In a previous ISR article, “Housing bubble deflates,” [3] Petrino DiLeo analyzed the housing and mortgage crisis.

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The most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from the control room - of an “end of history” in which taxes and onerous regulation will never be allowed to threaten the fortunes private individuals make for themselves. This is the longing behind the
former White House aide Karl Rove’s talk of “permanent majority” and, 20 years previously, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s declaration to the Republican convention that it’s “the job of all revolutions to make permanent their gains”.

When I first moved to contemplate this peculiar utopian vision, I was struck by its apparent futility. What I did not understand was that beating liberal ideas was not the goal. The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but by erasing it. Building a majority coalition has always been a part of the programme, and conservatives have enjoyed remarkable success at it for more than 30 years. But winning elections was not a bid for permanence by itself. It was only a means.

The end was capturing the state, and using it to destroy liberalism as a practical alternative. The pattern was set by Margaret Thatcher, who used state power of the heaviest-handed sort to implant permanently the anti-state ideology.

“Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul,” she said, echoing Stalin. In the 34 years before she became prime minister, Britain rode a see-saw of nationalisation, privatisation and renationalisation; Thatcher set out to end the game for good. Her plan for privatising council housing was designed not only to enthrone the market, but to encourage an ownership mentality and “change the soul” of an entire class of voters. When she sold off nationally owned industries, she took steps to ensure that
workers received shares at below-market rates, leading hopefully to the same soul transformation. Her brutal suppression of the miners’ strike in 1984 showed what now awaited those who resisted the new order. As a Business Week reporter summarised it in 1987: “She sees her mission as nothing less than eradicating Labour Party socialism as a political alternative.

”

In their own pursuit of the free-market utopia, America’s right-wingers did not have as far to travel as their British cousins, and they have never needed to use their state power so ruthlessly. But the pattern is the same: scatter the left’s constituencies, hack open the liberal state and reward friendly businesses with the loot.

Grover Norquist, one of the most influential conservatives in Washington and the “field marshal of the Bush plan”, according to The Nation magazine, has been most blunt about using the power of the state “to crush the structures of the left”. He has outlined the plan countless times in countless venues: the liberal movement is supported by a number of “pillars”, each of which can be toppled by conservatives when in power. Among Norquist’s suggestions has been the undermining of defense lawyers - who in the US give millions of dollars to liberal causes - with measures “potentially costing [them] billions of dollars of lost income”. Conservatives could
also “crush labour unions as a political entity” by forcing unions to get annual written approval from every member before spending union funds on political activities. His coup de grâce is that the Democratic Party in its entirety would become “a dead man walking” with the privatisation of social security.

Much of this programme has already been accomplished, if not on the
precise terms Norquist suggested. The shimmering dream of privatising social security, though, remains the great unreachable right-wing prize, and the right persists in the campaign, regardless of the measure’s unpopularity or the number of political careers it costs. President Bush announced privatisation to be his top priority on the day after his re-election in 2004, although he had not emphasised this issue during the campaign. He proceeded to chase it deep into the land of political unpopularity, a region from which he never really returned.

He did this because the potential rewards of privatising social security justify any political cost. At one stroke, it would both de-fund the operations of government and utterly reconfigure the way Americans interact with the state. It would be irreversible, too; the “transition costs” in any scheme to convert social security are so vast that no country can consider incurring them twice. Once the deal has been done and the trillions of dollars that pass through social security have been diverted from the US Treasury to stocks in private companies, the effects would be locked in for good. First, there would be an immediate flood of money into Wall Street; second, there would be an equivalent flow of money out of government
accounts, immediately propelling the federal deficit up into the stratosphere and de-funding a huge part of the federal activity.

Business elites
The overall effect for the nation’s politics would be to elevate for ever the rationale of the financial markets over such vague liberalisms as “the  common good” and “the public interest”. The practical results of such a titanic redirection of the state are easy to predict, given the persistent political demands of Wall Street: low wage growth, even weaker labour organisations, a free hand for management in downsizing, in polluting, and so on.

The longing for permanent victory over liberalism is not unique to the west. In country after country, business elites have come up with ingenious ways to limit the public’s political choices. One of the most effective of these has been massive public debt. Naomi Klein has pointed out, in case after case, that the burden of debt has forced democratic countries to accept a laissez-faire system that they find deeply distasteful. Regardless of who borrowed the money, these debts must be repaid - and repaying them, in turn, means that a nation must agree to restructure its economy the way
bankers bid: by deregulating, privatising and cutting spending.

Republicans have ridden to power again and again promising balanced
budgets - government debt was “mortgaging our future”, Ronald Reagan
admonished in his inaugural address - but once in office they proceed, with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, to inflate the federal deficit to levels far beyond those reached by their supposedly open-handed liberal rivals. The formal justification is one of the all-time great hoaxes. By cutting taxes, it is said, you will unleash such economic growth that federal
revenues will actually increase, so all the additional government spending will be paid for.

Even the theory’s proponents don’t really believe it. David Stockman, the libertarian budget director of the first Reagan administration, did the maths in 1980 and realised it would not rescue the government; it would wreck the government. This is the point where most people would walk away. Instead, Stockman decided it had medicinal value. He realised that with their government brought to the brink of fiscal collapse, the liberals would either
have to acquiesce in the reconfiguration of the state or else see the country destroyed. Stockman was candid about this: the left would “have to dismantle [the government's] bloated, wasteful, and unjust spending enterprises - or risk national ruin”.

This is government-by-sabotage: deficits were a way to smash a liberal state. The Reagan deficits did precisely this. When Reagan took over in 1981, he inherited an annual deficit of $59bn and a national debt of $914bn; by the time he and his successor George Bush had finished their work, they had quintupled the deficit and pumped the debt up to more than $3trn. Bill Clinton called the deficit “Stockman’s Revenge” - and it domin ated all other topics within his administration’s economic teams. With the chairman of the
Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan himself speaking of “financial catastrophe” unless steps were taken to control Reagan’s deficit, Clinton was soon a convert. He got tough with the federal workforce.

So-called virtues
George W Bush proceeded to plunge the budget into deficit again. Indeed, after seeing how the Reagan deficit had forced Clinton’s hand, it would have been foolish for a conservative not to spend his way back into the hole as rapidly as possible. “It’s perfectly fine for them to waste money,” says Robert Reich, a former labour secretary to Bill Clinton, summarising the conservative viewpoint. “If the public thinks government is wasteful, that’s
fine. That reduces public faith in government, which is precisely what the Republicans want.”

In 1964, the political theorist James Burnham diagnosed liberalism as “the ideology of western suicide”. What Burnham meant by this was that liberalism’s so-called virtues - its openness and its insistence on equal rights for everyone - made it vulnerable to any party that refuses to play by the rules. The “suicide” that all of this was meant to describe was liberalism’s inevitable destruction at the hands of communism, a movement in whose ranks Burnham had once marched himself. But his theory seems more accurately to describe the stratagems of its fans on the American right. And the correct term for the disasters that have disabled the liberal state is not suicide, but vandalism. Loot the Treasury, dynamite the dam,
take a crowbar to the monument and throw a wrench into the gears. Slam the locomotive into reverse, toss something heavy on the throttle, and jump for it.

Mainstream American political commentary customarily assumes that the two political parties do whatever they do as mirror images of each other; that if one is guilty of some misstep, the other is equally culpable. But there is no symmetry. Liberalism, as we know it, arose out of a compromise between left-wing social movements and business interests. It depends on the efficient functioning of certain organs of the state; it does not call for all-out war on private industry.

Conservatism, on the other hand, speaks not of compromise, but of removing its adversaries from the field altogether. While no one dreams of sawing off those branches of the state that protect conservatism’s constituents - the military, the police, legal privileges granted to corporations - conservatives openly fantasise about doing away with the bits of “big government” that serve liberal ends. While de-funding the left is the north star of the conservative project, there is no comparable campaign to “de-fund the right”; indeed, it would be difficult to imagine one.

“Over the past 30 years, American politics has become more money-centred at exactly the same time that American society has grown more unequal,” the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written. The resources and organisational heft of the well-off and hyper-conservative have exploded. But the organisational resources of middle-income Americans . . . have atrophied. The resulting inequality has greatly benefited the Republican Party while drawing it closer to its most affluent and
extreme supporters.”

In this sense, conservative Washington is a botch that keeps on working, constructing an imbalance that will tilt our politics rightward for years, a plutocracy that will stand, regardless of who wins the next few elections. And as American inequality widens, the clout of money will only grow more powerful.

As I write this, the lobbyist-fuelled conservative boom of the past ten years is being supplanted by a distinct conservative bust: like the real-estate speculators who are dumping properties all over the country, conservative senators and representatives are heading for the revolving door in record numbers.

Plutocracy
The Democrats who have taken their place are an improvement, certainly, but for the party’s more entrepreneurial leaders electoral success in 2006 was merely an opportunity to accelerate their own courtship of Washington’s lobbyists, think-tanks and pressure groups staked out on K Street. Democratic leaders have proved themselves the Republicans’ equals in circumvention of campaign finance laws.

Throwing the rascals out is no longer enough. The problem is structural; it is inscribed on the map; it glows from the illuminated logos on the contractors’ office buildings; it is built into the systems of governance themselves. A friend of mine summarised this concisely as we were lunching in one of those restaurants where the suits and the soldiers get together. Sweeping his hand so as to take in our fellow diners and all the contractors’ offices beyond, he said, “So you think all of this is just going to
go away if Obama gets in?” This whole economy, all these profits?

He’s right, of course; maybe even righter than he realised. It would be nice if electing Democrats was all that was required to resuscitate the America that the right flattened, but it will take far more than that. A century ago, an epidemic of public theft persisted, despite a long string of reformers in the White House, Republicans and Democrats, each promising to clean the place up. Nothing worked, and for this simple reason: democracy cannot work
when wealth is distributed as lopsidedly as theirs was-and as ours is. The inevitable consequence of plutocracy, then and now, is bought government.

This is an edited extract from Thomas Frank’s “The Wrecking Crew”,
published this month by Harvill Secker (£14.99)

© Thomas Frank, 2008

Writer and social critic Thomas Frank founded The Baffler, a magazine devoted to cultural criticism. He’s also the author of three nonfiction books: The Conquest of Cool, One Market Under God and What’s the Matter with Kansas?, an analysis of conservatism that asks the question, ‘Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests?’ A Kansas native, Frank earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and has contributed to several publications, including Harper’s, The Nation and The Chicago Reader.

By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — The rich may be different for John McCain and Barack Obama.

On almost every issue, the two presidential candidates have staked out opposing positions. Their contrasting views on wealth surfaced during their back-to-back appearances in Southern California on Saturday night when each was asked to define “rich.”

Obama didn’t hesitate. “I would argue that if you are making more than $250,000, then you are in the top 3, 4 percent of this country,” he said. “You are doing well.”

McCain took a far more discursive approach to answering the question but ultimately settled on a dramatically higher figure: “I think if you’re just talking about income, how about $5 million?”

The Arizona Republican quickly added that he was “sure that comment will be distorted,” and his campaign said Sunday that he was joking.

Even so, the remark highlighted the candidates’ disparate outlooks. Analysts who study income distribution said the answers appeared to reflect shifting political calculations more than economic reality.

Economists said in interviews Sunday that neither candidate was wrong because there are no agreed-upon definitions for the terms that describe income segments.

“To be fair to both of them, ‘rich’ is an adjective,” said James P. Smith, a senior economist at the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan think thank in Santa Monica. “Economic science is not going to tell you that ‘this’ is the cutoff point.”

Yet the $5-million level, Smith said, includes “almost nobody.” Experts said that of all the households in the nation, fewer than one-tenth of 1% had an annual income of $5 million or more.

Ken Goldstein, an economist for the Conference Board, a business-research group based in New York, said he would define rich as income about $500,000 or more. “If you set the bar at half a million, you’re talking about the top 1% of taxpayers. If you think about the last eight years, those are the folks who have benefited the most.”

Other economists said they would have gone with a lower figure. Even the moderator who asked the question of the candidates, Pastor Rick Warren of Orange County’s Saddleback Church, did not seem to anticipate a reply beyond the lower six figures, urging each man to “give me a specific number . . . is it 100,000 [dollars], is it 50, 200?”

Most ordinary Americans tend to massage the definitions of such terms in an attempt to crowd themselves into what many consider the least offensive category.

“If you do surveys, 95% of people think they are middle class,” said Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan group that has analyzed the candidates’ tax proposals. “This is including people who are objectively quite poor and people who are objectively quite rich.”

Burman added: “I guess it says something nice about America that rich people don’t want to act like they’re better than anybody else and poor people don’t like complaining about how tough it is to pay their bills.”

I totally disagree here. It’s not a good thing that Americans would rather lie and conceal their true circumstances than acknowledge the reality of their situations. Until we stop deceiving ourselves this way and accept that we are not a “classless” society, we don’t have a chance in hell of ever improving.

By Patrick Martin
16 August 2008
World Socialist Web Site

The agreement between the United States and the right-wing government of Poland to base a US anti-missile system in that country is the first major response of American imperialism to the Russian intervention in Georgia.

Georgian opposition party members close ranks to protest Russian policies at the Russian Embassy in Tbilisi.

The Bush administration has pressed Poland and the Czech Republic to accept US anti-missile systems and radar installations on the pretext that they are being deployed to prevent an attack on Europe by Iran, which possesses neither the required ballistic missile warheads nor nuclear weapons. Despite vehement protests from Moscow, US officials have denied that the anti-missile systems represent a threat to Russia.

However, the circumstances in which the agreement with Poland was signed make clear that it is directed against Moscow. Long stalled by wrangling between Warsaw and Washington over Polish demands for high-tech anti-aircraft systems as the price for basing the missiles, the pact was wrapped up within days of the appearance of Polish President Lech  Kaczynski alongside Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili at an anti-Russian rally in Tbilisi.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared ominously, “We have crossed the Rubicon,” after representatives of his government signed the accord in Warsaw. It is obvious that his comments were motivated not by fears of a mythical Iranian threat, but by concern over the Russian military, which fought two world wars on Polish soil in the twentieth century.

There are two exceptional features of the accord, added as incentives to Poland. First, the United States will immediately transfer a Patriot anti-missile battery from Germany to Slupsk on the Baltic Sea, about 100 miles from the Polish border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The New York Times noted: “American troops would join the Polish military, at least temporarily, at the front lines—facing east toward Russia.” The 110 American soldiers stationed there will serve as a sort of human tripwire, ensuring that any Polish-Russian conflict quickly involves the United States.

Secondly, the US agreed to an obligation to defend Poland in case of attack with greater speed than required under current procedures of NATO, which Poland joined in March 1999. “Poland and the Poles do not want to be in alliances in which assistance comes at some point later—it is no good when assistance comes to dead people,” Prime Minister Tusk said on Polish television. “Poland wants to be in alliances where assistance comes in the very first hours of—knock on wood—any possible conflict.”

Polish Prime Minister Tusk

Russian officials responded to the US-Polish agreement with apocalyptic language. General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of staff, said that Poland was “exposing itself to a strike, 100 percent.” He noted that Russian military doctrine sanctions the use of nuclear weapons, not only against any nation that conducts an attack on Russia with nuclear weapons, but “against the allies of countries having nuclear weapons if they in some way help them.”

“The USA is busy with its own missile defense system,” he said. “It does not intend to defend Poland at this point. Poland lays itself open to attack by giving the USA permission to deploy the system. The country may become an object of Russia’s reaction. Such targets are destroyed in the first instance.”

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev denounced the agreement at a news
conference, where he stood side-by-side with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “The deployment of new anti-missile forces has as its aim the Russian Federation,” he said. “Therefore, any fairy tales about deterring other states, fairy tales that with the help of this system we will deter some sort of rogue states, no longer work.”

The logic of US policy, as the Polish agreement testifies, leads inexorably in the direction of a military confrontation between the United States and Russia, two massively armed nuclear powers. This raises once again, as in the years preceding 1914 and 1939, the specter of world war, this time with the likely consequence of nuclear annihilation.

It is not simply a matter of gauging the intentions of Bush and Cheney, scheduled to leave office in five months, or of their successor, either Obama or McCain. The events and the decisions of the past week have their own logic. The impending insertion of US military forces into what were once called the “buffer states,” the region separating Russia proper from Central Europe, has immense historical and political significance.

This region was the battleground in two world wars, in which tens of
millions died—30 million in the Soviet Union alone as a result of the Nazi invasion through the very territory on which US anti-missile systems will now be deployed. (It is worth pointing out as well, that while the historical and political circumstances are different, Hitler’s geo-strategic aim was the same as Bush’s: to gain control of the oil resources of the Caspian basin.)

There are dozens of potential flashpoints in this vast territory—unresolved border disputes between Russia and many of the successor states of the former USSR, as well as conflicts involving Russian-populated enclaves such as Kaliningrad, next to Poland, and Trans-Dniestria, on the Moldova-Ukraine border, and huge Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states and Ukraine. Any one of these could become the spark for a military conflict in which the United States is now a potential combatant.

The Bush administration has maintained, in a series of leaks to the US  media, that it sought to restrain Saakashvili from attacking the pro-Russian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and that the Georgian president ignored its advice. This version of events is entirely unbelievable, given the integration of US military advisers into the Georgian military command. But even if true, it would mean that Washington has so little control over events that a reckless nationalistic demagogue can use its backing to trigger a major international crisis. Such political arsonists play a major role in
every country in Eastern Europe.

George Friedman

As George Friedman of Stratfor.com, a strategic analysis web site, detailed in an article published August 13: “It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia’s mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian frontier. US technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions.”

While Friedman suggests that the apparent surprise of the Bush administration was an expression of its strategic incompetence, there is another and more sinister explanation: the US government wanted the military conflict to erupt, despite the inevitable Georgian rout at the hands of the Russian army, because the crisis would serve its ends, both internationally—viz., Poland—and domestically, where the Republican Party is relying on war fever to bolster its beleaguered presidential campaign.

In the wake of the ceasefire in Georgia, reluctantly signed by Saakashvili Friday with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pressuring him in person, it has become even clearer that the week-long American media and diplomatic campaign over alleged Russian aggression is an example of the “big lie” technique.

It now turns out that the scale of the Russian military intervention was relatively small, with a total of 15,000 troops engaged, barely half the number that Georgia has under arms, suggesting that Moscow never  intended to overrun the country. CNN reported Friday that the total number of Russian troops in Gori, the city whose occupation supposedly represented an attempt to cut Georgia in half, was only 200.

The bulk of the US accounts of the events in Georgia consisted of unconfirmed charges of Russian and Ossetian atrocities against Georgian civilians, with little or no reporting on the Georgian onslaught on South Ossetia that touched off the conflict in the first place.

The Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Churkin, denounced US claims that Russia was conducting a “war of terror” in Georgia. Such language was “absolutely unacceptable,” he said, “particularly from the lips of the permanent representative of a country whose actions we are aware of, including with regard to civilian populations in Iraq and Afghanistan and Serbia.”

There has been virtually no acknowledgement in the American media of
the grotesque double standard being employed by the Bush administration, under which its own violations of international law and depredations against innocent civilians are ignored, while far less provocative actions by other powers are vilified and their leaders demonized.

In Georgia, for example, Russia deployed, just outside its borders, less than 10 percent of the number of American troops that have been dispatched thousands of miles to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, overthrow their governments and establish US-backed puppet regimes.

Yet Bush could declare, in a press statement Friday, “The days of satellites and spheres of influence are behind us.” The man who in 2002 branded three sovereign states “an axis of evil,” ultimately invading one and conducting economic warfare against the other two, continued: “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”

Senator John McCain, by far the most vocal advocate of a confrontational policy against Russia, sounded a similar delusional note, telling reporters during a Michigan presidential campaign appearance: “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” The Republican presidential candidate has been the most fervent advocate of US military escalation in Iraq, while his rival, Democrat Barack Obama, is playing the same role in relation to
Afghanistan.

The bipartisan unity of Bush, McCain and Obama over the Russo-Georgian conflict demonstrates again that the vast majority of the American people—who oppose the war in Iraq and have no interest in provoking a war with Russia—are disenfranchised in the presidential election. There has been virtually no public discussion about the implications of the US-Polish agreement, which could involve the American people in a military conflict of incalculable dimensions.

The crisis in Georgia has sent shock waves through international relations. The ramifications extend not only into Eastern Europe, as demonstrated by the Polish action, but to the wider Caucasus region, the Middle East and Central Asia.

In the Caucasus, the initial impact was the shutdown of pipeline segments which carry Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (B-T-C) pipeline was built with American support to provide an outlet for oil supplies to the world market independent of both Russia and Iran, which Washington regards as its two main adversaries in the region.

Both Turkey and Israel have been drawn into the crisis. President Bush declared that the US Navy would move to the Georgian coast to provide “humanitarian aid” and test Russia’s willingness to allow freedom of the seas. But Turkey must give its consent to the passage of warships through the straits connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea. State Department officials indicated that the naval deployment might have to be abandoned because of Turkish opposition.

Israel is also deeply implicated in the conflict. As the Israeli web site Ynet observed, “The fighting which broke out over the weekend between Russia and Georgia has brought Israel’s intensive involvement in the region into the limelight. This involvement includes the sale of advanced weapons to Georgia and the training of the Georgian army’s infantry forces.”

As for the Russian regime, Putin and Medvedev are pursuing a reactionary nationalist policy that appeals to the most backward moods in Russian society. Their arrogance and bullying only alienate the working people of Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States and the wider working class audience internationally.

The Putin regime is the instrument of the semi-criminal new bourgeoisie that emerged out of the dismantling of the Soviet Union, recruited in large measure from the ranks of the old Stalinist bureaucracy and possessing all its vices—above all, the national chauvinism that became the hallmark of Stalinism.

In the final analysis, the conflict between the United States and Russia is the inevitable outcome of the world crisis of the capitalist system, which takes the form not only of economic slump and financial convulsions, but of great-power conflict leading inexorably to imperialist war.

The only social force that can prevent imperialism from dragging mankind into a military holocaust is the international working class. It must be united and mobilized on the basis of the program of world socialist revolution to put an end to capitalism and the reactionary nation-state system, which are the root causes of militarism and war.

Despite conflict between environmentalists and the immigrants’ rights
movement, congressional candidate Omar Lopez thinks the Greens could
supplant the Democrats as Latinos’ party of choice.

By Kari Lydersen
Chicago Reader, August 14, 2008
http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/greenparty/

Omar Lopez

The most impressive thing about the Green Party’s national nominating
convention, held at Symphony Center July 10-13, might’ve been how multiracial it was. In the crowd, black nationalists and young activists of all colors mingled with white hippies. Fiery former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who’s African-American, was named the Greens’ presidential candidate, and Rosa Clemente, a Latina hip-hop activist and journalist from New York, was slated for vice president.

But when keynote speaker Omar Lopez took the podium, it became clear
that there’s more to the browning of the Green Party than just putting
nonwhite candidates up for office. There’s a move, especially in Chicago, to incorporate immigration rights as a central issue for progressive Greens, whose focus on environmentalism has sometimes pitted them directly against immigrants.

Lopez, a Mexican-American and longtime immigrants’ rights organizer,
is running for the Fourth District congressional seat against incumbent representative Luis Gutierrez, who has represented the mostly Latino district for almost 16 years and is known for his own advocacy of immigrants’ rights. A leader of the March 10 Movement, Lopez was part of the coalition that staged the massive downtown immigrants’ rights marches in 2006 and smaller May Day marches in 2007 and 2008. He’s run unsuccessfully for political office twice as a Democrat, both times against Gutierrez.

Luis Gutierrez

Lopez and his supporters say Gutierrez isn’t doing enough for the cause, and they’re calling on Latinos to make the Green Party their route to change. (It might be easier to do that now than ever before: Since Green  gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney got more than 10 percent of the vote in the 2006 election, the party now qualifies as “established” through 2010 under Illinois election law. That means that, like Republican and Democratic candidates, Green candidates need only 5,000 valid signatures on their nominating petitions, as opposed to the 25,000 a candidate from a “new” party has to gather. It also allows the party to slate candidates for office in the general election.)

The Greens have been active in Pilsen for the last eight years. A handful of them cofounded the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO), which spurred city and state agencies to order the H. Kramer smelting plant to clean up its operations and has spearheaded several nonbinding ballot initiatives demanding that the Fisk coal-burning power plant in Pilsen reduce its emissions. But, despite long hours of knocking on doors, the party’s been slow to gain widespread support in the  neighborhood, a longtime power base for the Daley-allied Hispanic Democratic Organization.

With Lopez’s candidacy, local Green activists the majority of them still white hope to build meaningful relationships with immigrants and the immigrants’ rights movement. The alliance is equally important to Latino activists.

“We knew we had to have a candidate come out of the March 10 Movement,” says Lopez. “The slogan of the marches was ‘Today we march, tomorrow we vote.’ It would be an empty slogan if we didn’t have a candidate.”

On the national level, the environmental movement has been largely divorced from or even hostile to immigrants’ rights movements. Advocates of drastically reduced immigration targets, ranging from “zero population growth” to “replacement level” immigration levels, include Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson (a former Wisconsin senator), Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, Sea Shepherds and Greenpeace activist Paul Watson, and Randy Hayes, former leader of the Rainforest Action Network.

Since the mid-1980s anti-immigrant forces have repeatedly launched

attempts to gain control of the national board of the Sierra Club, and in the early 90s the California Sierra Club joined with explicitly anti-immigrant groups to form the Coalition to Stabilize Population. In 1998 a petition drive by members forced a vote which could have forced the board to adopt a stringent immigration-control position.
The measure failed, and the board maintained neutrality on the issue. But, in 2004 a slate of five outspokenly anti-immigrant candidates, including former Colorado governor Dick Lamm, launched what was described as a “hostile takeover attempt” of the 15-member national board, which already included five members with anti-immigration views. White power groups even lobbied their members to join the Sierra Club so they could vote in the election. Morris Dees of the watchdog group Southern Poverty Law Center called it “the greening of hate.”

But local Greens say they have long seen a nexus between immigrants’
rights issues and the environmental, racial, and economic justice policies of their party. At the nominating convention the Greens adopted a new immigration-related platform that includes permanent border passes for Mexican and Canadian citizens, an end to immigration-related racial profiling and English-only laws, and immigration laws that “promote fairness, nondiscrimination and family reunification.”

“Immigration hasn’t been a central issue in past campaigns, but that’s
changing this year,” said Jerry Mead-Lucero, a Green activist who met his wife, Claudia Mead-Lucero, through the March 10 Movement. “Our platform on immigration is much better than the Democrats’. It’s tying in to positions on globalization and free trade. Any free trade pact should have free passage over borders, like in the EU.”

And with the quickly growing Latino immigrant population nationwide and its widespread disillusionment with the Republican and Democratic parties’ failure to pass immigration reform, immigrant communities are fertile ground for new party members.

“This will be a reflection of what the Green Party can offer minorities,” says Lopez. “The Green Party is not well known by Latinos yet, but this is an opportunity for the party.”

Lopez, 63, is himself an immigrant: he came to Humboldt Park with his
parents from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, in 1958. He became politicized in the wake of riots that swept the Puerto Rican community when a police officer shot a youth after the Puerto Rican Parade in June 1966. His first and second wives were Puerto Rican (he’s now divorced), and he’s been an activist in the Puerto Rican community for years.

In the late 60s he served as minister of information for the Young Lords, an organization formed by local Puerto Rican street gang members to address community issues. Based in Lincoln Park, then a rough Puerto Rican neighborhood, it was similar in genesis and philosophy to the better-known Black Panthers, with gang member and activist Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez its highest-profile figure.

“The mission was basically self-deter?mina?tion for Puerto Rico and for the neighborhood,” Jimenez says. “Community empowerment and the whole question of Puerto Rico being a direct colony of the U.S.”

In 1969 the Young Lords joined the Black Panthers and the Young Patriots, an Uptown-based group of white working-class young people with Appalachian roots, to form the Rainbow Coalition. “We were all organizations fighting against displacement,” Jimenez says. “Prior to that no one had really fought back against the Daley machine.” They worked with Mexican, Chicano, Chinese, and other ethnic activists in a larger multiracial organizing movement in Chicago, and chapters in other cities spun off from the Chicago organization.

They used a formula similar to the Panthers, “a survival-pending-revolution model of organizing,” says James Tracy, author of a forthcoming book on the Rainbow Coalition. Also like the Panthers, the group sometimes invited suspicion because of its gang ties: “A certain element was definitely not interested in dropping the drugs and the violence,” he says. But “they had extensive social services, breakfast programs, literacy programs, Puerto Rican history classes. They were communicating and meeting basic needs of their community while agitating against urban renewal plans.”

Lopez was also a founding member of the mostly Puerto Rican Latin American Defense Organization, which advocated for tenants’ rights and
other issues in Humboldt Park. In the 70s he taught in the public schools, joining the fight for bilingual education. From there he moved into a post as a bilingual-education specialist for the Board of Education, where he worked from 1977 to 1983.

In 1982 he was named assistant general supervisor for the Park District under Daley loyalist Ed Kelly, a position Lopez says he gained through his advocacy for more soccer fields. In this role he helped secure the Pilsen Park District building that now houses the National Museum of Mexican Art. In 1986, after the amnesty immigration law was passed by the Reagan administration, Lopez left the Park District to help undocumented immigrants get their papers and served as president of the Little Village Chamber of Commerce. Since the mid-90s he’s been director of CALOR, a nonprofit organization serving Latinos with HIV/AIDS.

Lopez first threw his hat in the ring against Gutierrez in 1986, when he challenged him for alderman and committeeman of the 26th Ward, but he withdrew from the race early on. He tried for committeeman again in 1988 but lost by a wide margin. He knows most people probably expect a similar result in November.

“People say I’m crazy,” he says. “Gutierrez is very powerful. He’ll probably harness most of the money, but I’ll run a very grassroots campaign with the community groups, soccer leagues, churches.”

Pilsen Green Party activist and 2006 state senate candidate Dorian Breuer notes that Green Party candidates consider themselves flush if they’re outspent by their opponents only by a measure of ten to one. Jorge Mujica, another March 10 Movement organizer, says one of the campaign’s resources will be undocumented residents, who can’t vote “but can hand out flyers and knock on doors.”

In some ways the race between Gutierrez and Lopez will epitomize a bitter split in the immigrants’ rights movement. Gutierrez is cosponsor of one 2007 immigration reform proposal, the STRIVE Act (Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy), which remains stalled in a House committee more than a year after the failure of the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill in the Senate.
One immigrants’ rights faction, including the powerful local group Centro Sin Fronteras, endorses STRIVE as a needed vehicle for family reunification and a means of securing legal residency for many undocumented immigrants. But another, including the March 10 Movement, has decried the bill, which among other things calls for building new immigration detention centers, increasing border security and surveillance with the help of the Department of Defense, and instituting a guest worker program with stringent requirements including a $500 application fee.

“People see [Gutierrez] as a champion of immigrants, but the proposals
he’s put forth are far from that,” said Lopez. “I don’t see immigration as a problem of national security where you need to militarize the border. I see it as a labor issue. As long as you criminalize immigrants and ignore their economic contribution, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.”

Gutierrez declined to comment for this story.

Mujica thinks the Fourth District race will also pit the Mexican community against the Puerto Rican community. The obviously gerrymandered Fourth District is shaped like a horseshoe, with a largely Puerto Rican north-side chunk encompassing Humboldt Park and Logan Square connected by a thin strip hugging I-294 down to mostly Mexican suburbs and neighborhoods including Stone Park, Cicero, Little Village, Pilsen, and Back of the Yards.

But Lopez who might have more Puerto Rican support than your average
Mexican-American candidate sees it as a split between Latinos who have
benefited or hope to benefit from the Latino arm of Daley’s Democratic
machine and those who want to strike out on their own. At the nominating convention Lopez didn’t mince words in describing the former: “We are going to stumble on many Latinos who will reject the Green Party because they joined the Democratic Party in search of privileges, a job, to be elected to a political position, even to get some consulting and patronage contracts,” he said. These “mercenary political activists close the door for others who are sincerely wanting to participate in the electoral process.”

Cha Cha Jimenez sees it in similar terms.

“If I was in Chicago I’d probably work 24 hours a day for [Lopez's] campaign,” he said. “Not to say I don’t like Gutierrez?he’s done a lot for our community. But are we here to empower Mayor Daley or empower the people?”

She argues for the Green Party’s vital need to present ourselves as “a professional, creative and positive political voice” and “a credible, professional alternative”, not only as a pure and idealistic force. She emphatically appeals that we need to focus on the common values we share and work together for our common goals, if we are to succeed.

Some might disagree with her political styles and approaches. However, what is certain are that her voice is valuable to the green discourse and Green politics, and that her ideas merit consideration and discussion, both within and outside of the Green Party.

Is the Green Party running the first ever Hip-Hop ticket? The McKinney Clemente Presidential Campaign continues to garner endorsements of many leaders in the hip-hop community. If you haven’t heard, Public Enemy’s legendary Proffesor Griff supports the ticket as does M1 from Dead Prez; La Bruja; MC NYOil; and most recently, RAS (Riders Against the Storm). Check out RAS latest video “Speak the Truth” endorsing the campaign:

Ballot Access is Key to success!

The clock is ticking for a few state Green Parties and we need all available volunteers to help complete ballot access drives! The McKinney campaign seeks to pull up another chair to the national political dialogue, but we can’t win 5% of the national vote without ballot access in as many states as possible.

If you live in or near one of the following states and can help collect petitions on the street, at events, or from family and friends, please contact the following coordinators:

Tom Yager (Virginia) vagreen@earthlink.net
Michael O’Neill (New York) petition@gpny.org
Deanna Taylor (Utah) deesings@xmission.com
Anita Rios (Ohio) rhannon@toast.net
Phil Huckelberry (Kentucky) phil.huckelberry@gmail.com
Holly Hart (Iowa) hhart11@gmail.com
Greg Gerritt (Rhode Island) gerritt@mindspring.com

You can also start right now by downloading petitions, volunteering for the Ballot Access Committee, and making a financial contribution at www.gp.org/committees/ballot/.

Students and teachers - school will be back in session soon and ‘Obama-mania’ and ‘McCain-ity’ will soon be spreading on campus. We need to spread the word about the McKinney/Clemente campaign and build the groundwork for campus organizations for years to come.

If you are a student, teacher or staff member and have been a member of a campus Green Party chapter or want to get one started at your school, please e-mail us at campus@gp.org.

We are looking to provide resources for campus Green Party chapters, hook you up with Greens from your school, and help you form a lasting chapter that can help train the next generation of Green Party leadership. If you have a group together already or need help, e-mail campus@gp.org today!

GREEN PARTY OF CONNECTICUT

Peach iced tea, peach shortcake and impeachment are on the menu Thursday in Hartford for a rally and fundraiser to remove Bush and Cheney, sponsored by the CONNECTICUT GREEN PARTY. ?Impeachment is always in season, but native peaches come around just once a year, starting now. said Steve Fournier party host and candidate for the 1st Congressional District in Hartford.

The event is Thursday, August 21 from 7 to 9 pm at 74 Tremont Street,
Hartford, where Ruth and Steve Fournier reside. Steve Fournier, Green
Party candidate for Congress, will make brief remarks and he said, “There will be a time for exchanges of rage and frustration over the state of government, controlled by thugs and accountable to no authority whatsoever.”

The event is open to all, but any donations will be accepted and
partygoers are encouraged to bring their favorite peach recipe.

Fournier is running for the First Congressional district for the first
time and Greens will field candidates in all five Congressional districts, which is believed to be the first time a slate of third party candidates have run for all of the congressional districts in Connecticut.

CONTACT; Steve Fournier telephone 860-794-6718
email: sfournier1945@yahoo.com
Tim McKee cell (860) 860-778-1304
email: timmckee@mail.com
Mike DeRosa, State Co-Chair (860)956-8170 or
(860) 919-4042 (cell)