https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsViymC8lkU
Saturday, May 15, 2021
Richard Wolff: How Joe Biden Can ACTUALLY Meet the Moment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY6vit-SnuU
Friday, May 14, 2021
THE ‘ZAPATISTA INVASION’ HAS BEGUN!
By Jérôme Baschet, ROAR Magazine.
May 13, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/the-zapatista-invasion-has-begun/
After Months Of Preparations, A Delegation Of The Zapatistas Has Set Sail From Mexico Towards Europe.
The “reversed conquest” has well and truly started.
Originally published in French at Lundimatin. Translation by Bastian Still.
It was a genuine surprise when the Zapatistas published their communiqué “A Mountain on the High Seas” on October 5, 2020, announcing a tour of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) across five continents, starting with Europe. Even though the Zapatistas have not shied away from organizing initiatives in Chiapas and across Mexico — the March of the Color of the Earth just 20 years ago is a case in point — it is basically the first time since 1994 that they are leaving the borders of their homeland behind.
Then, on January 1 of this year, they published a Declaration for Life, co-signed with hundreds of individuals, collectives and organizations, outlining the objective of this voyage: making a contribution to the effort for anti-capitalist struggles — which are inseparable from the struggles for life — to converge in full consciousness of their differences and unhampered by homogenizing or hegemonizing forces.
In the past six months, extensive organizing has taken place at the European level, as well as in each individual country or “geography,” according to the Zapatista vocabulary. For instance, a francophone coordinating body has been established, which includes eight regional federations of collectives and local initiatives.
Meanwhile, the EZLN confirmed that a large delegation of more than a hundred members, three-quarters of which are women, was getting ready. The delegation is also said to be accompanied by members of the National Indigenous Congress–Indigenous Council of Government which unites Indigenous struggles across Mexico, as well as a contingent of the People’s Front in Defense of Land and Water of Puebla, Morelos and Tlaxcala which is fighting against the installation of a massive power plant that is threatening to divert water resources indispensable to the peasants in the region.
The Voyage For Life – Europe Chapter
On April 10, the anniversary of Emiliano Zapata’s assassination, they announced the departure of the first party of the Zapatista delegation, destined to make its voyage by sea. We had expected to see them leave the caracol of Morelia that day, where the members had been preparing themselves for months. A formal ritual was performed for the occasion, with traditional music, incense and purifying acts (“limpia”), upon a life-size model of a ship’s prow.
But the group did not set out on their journey right away: first they went into a 15-day quarantine to ensure that no one leaves the Zapatista territory carrying any other virus than that of rebellion. This decision is in line with the EZLN’s resolution to take all the required precautionary sanitary measures to avoid the spread of COVID-19 upon themselves and outside of state mandates. This had led them to issue a red alert and close off access to all Zapatista caracoles since March 15, 2020.
The maritime delegation was baptized “Escadron 421” because it is composed of four women, two men and one transgender person (“unoa otroa” in the Zapatista lexicon), who were individually introduced in a communique of Subcomandante Galeano.
After another farewell party on Sunday, April 25, accompanied by the exhibition of numerous paintings and sculptures, encouraging speeches by the Council of Good Government and a communal ball, the delegation departed the next day from Morelia. From there they reached the Mexican harbor at Isla Mujeres where a ship named “La Montaña” was awaiting them and they set sail for the Atlantic crossing on May 2. The Escadron 421 is now at the mercy of the ocean’s wiles, under the capable seamanship of the ship’s crew. They should be within sight of the European coast at the port of Vigo in Spain in the second half of June.
Simultaneously smaller celebrations were organized by the sound of drums and all sorts of encouragements to accompany the departure of other members of the Zapatista delegation, leaving their villages in the Lacandon jungle, at times using canoes to descent the rivers of this tropical region close to the Guatemalan border. They are part of different groups of the Zapatista delegation, which will reach the old continent, by air travel this time, from the beginning of July onwards.
So will begin months of intensive activities, meetings and exchanges all over Europa for the Zapatistas. Thus far they have received and accepted invitations from a great number of “geographies”: Austria, Basque Country, Belgium, Bulgaria, Catalonia, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Sardinia, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and Ukraine.
Hundreds of meetings and activities have been proposed to the Zapatistas, which are currently being coordinated. These events will be made public by the organizing collectives when the time comes. This might also include larger gatherings/rallies, around all current struggles: from the Gilets Jaunes to ZAD’s, in the case of France, and other resistance groups fighting destructive mega projects; feminist collectives, migrant support initiatives, groups struggling against police violence, as well as movements aiming to undo colonial forms of domination; mutual aid networks based in cities and rural areas as well as those involved in building alternative ways of living; not forgetting the critical mobilizing efforts compelled by, as the Zapatistas emphasize, the bloody tragedies of our wounded planet. The list — incomplete here — is long in the vast constellation of rebellions against capitalist brutality and struggles for other, more desirable worlds.
Above all, the Zapatistas have explained that they are coming to exchange with — that is, to speak, and even more so, to listen to — all those that have invited them “to talk about our mutual histories, our sufferings, our rages, our successes and our failures.” Especially in grassroots meetings so there is enough time to get to know and learn from one another.
The Zapatistas have long since argued for our struggles not to remain isolated from each other, and have underlined the importance of constructing global networks of resistance and rebellion. There is no need to enumerate all the international events that they have organized in Chiapas from the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and against Neoliberalism (also referred to as “Intergalactic”) in 1996 until the Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra seminar in 2015. But in August 2019, while announcing the recent advancement in local self-government with the establishment of four new autonomous communes and seven new Councils of Good Government, the Zapatistas had made it clear not to be organizing any large events anymore. Instead they were planning to take part in “meetings with groups, collectives, and organizations that work [struggle] within their geographies.”
There was no question back then of touring the five continents, but it could be — among many other reasons to set out on such a journey — a way to initiate this very process. If such an approach may indeed resonate with the widely felt need to weave stronger bonds between existing struggles, this requires not only an exchange to identify the commonalities and differences but especially a human-to-human encounter that can forge interconnection.
The Zapatistas are calling this journey the “Voyage for Life,” and it will present an opportunity for a vast number of people to meet the Zapatistas and learn more from their experiment in autonomy and dignity, persevered against overwhelming odds for over a quarter century. And, hopefully, many will allow themselves to be won over by the virus of rebellion of which the Zapatista are contagious carriers.
Let’s also hope that all those who identify with the Declaration for Life and for whom the autonomy of the Zapatista is a shining source of aspiration and inspiration will be ready to welcome them, support their itinerant initiative and participate in a manner best suited to each and every one on this Voyage for Life.
The Continent Renamed “Slumil K’ajxemk’op”
Returning to the Escadron 421. Since the first announcement, the Zapatistas have talked about their voyage towards Europe as a reversed process of conquest. The idea of the inversed invasion — this time with consent — amuses them. Obviously, it is said in jest — but are we entirely sure? When the delegation left, scale models ironically alluded to the caravels of Christopher Columbus: “No soy una Niña” and “Santa Maria La Revancha”; but it was also clarified that it is only if the members of Squadron 421 manage to land on European soil that it can be truly said that “the invasion has started.” If all goes well, they will be in Madrid on August 13, 2021, to celebrate in their own way the quincentenary of the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan by the army of Hernan Cortés.
The Indigenous population of Chiapas, like all those on the American continent, have for five centuries suffered the implications of colonization, including all the forms of internal colonialism and racism that extend it. The Zapatistas have made it clear, however, that they are not coming to Madrid to get a formal apology from the Spanish state or the Catholic church. They reject the essentialist condemnation of the “West” as evil and fully assimilated to the colonizers, as well as the attitude that relegates the colonized to the role of victim. On the contrary, they are intending to tell the Spaniards “that they have not conquered us [and] that we are still resisting and in fact in open rebellion.”
To make this voyage in reverse is to nuance a history that has assigned deeply entrenched and unambiguous positions to the vanquisher and the vanquished, and unlock the possibility for an alternative history.
When the maritime Zapatista delegation reaches Europe it is Marijose, “unoa otroa” of the Escadron 421 that will go ashore first. The following is how Subcomandante Galeano described the scene in advance; an inversion of the gesture by which Christopher Columbus — who disembarked on October 12, 1492, neither as a conqueror nor as a discoverer, since he was only seeking to find the already known lands of Japan and China — rushed to plant his cross and impose the name San Salvador on the island of Guanahaní:
Thus, the first foot that will set on European soil (that is, if they let us disembark) will not be that of man or a woman. It will be the foot of another.
With what the deceased SupMarcos would have described as “a slap with a black stocking in the face of all the heteropatriarchal left,” it has been decided that the first person to disembark will be Marijose.
As soon as they will have planted both feet firmly on European ground and recovered from seasickness, Marijose will shout out:
“Surrender, pale heteropatriarchal faces who persecute that which is different!”
Nah, I’m joking. But wouldn’t it be good if they did?
No, on stepping out on land the Zapatista compa Marijose will solemnly declare:
“In the name of women, of children, of men, of elders and, of course, of other Zapatistas, I declare that the name of this land, which its natives today call “Europe” will henceforth be known as: SLUMIL K’AJXEMK’OP, which means “Rebel Land,” or, “Land that doesn’t yield, that doesn’t fail.” And thus it will be known by its inhabitants as well as by strangers as long as there is someone who will not abandon, who will not sell out, and who will not capitulate.”
Welcome, compañeroas, compañeras and compañeros zapatistas, to the diverse geographies of the continent that will soon be renamed Slumil K’ajxemk’op.
SHEIKH JARRAH: WHAT IS HAPPENING AND HOW YOU CAN TAKE ACTION NOW
By the Palestinian BDS National Committee.
May 13, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/sheikh-jarrah-what-is-happening-and-how-you-can-take-action-now/
Watching Apartheid Israel’s Bloody Crushing Of Popular Palestinian Protests In Sheikh Jarrah Calls Us To Action.
We have proven before our collective power in the form of #BDS. Here are 9 actions you can take to fight Israeli impunity and #SaveSheikhJarrah.
Over the last number of weeks and days Palestinian protests to #SaveSheikhJarrah, in occupied East Jerusalem, have grown in size. They have been met with brutal repression by Israeli apartheid security forces, including police officers trained in Israel’s police training academy partially owned by G4S and Allied Universal.
Indigenous Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah have fought lengthy legal battles in Israeli courts against eviction orders which would see them ethnically cleansed, forcefully evicted from their homes, and replaced with illegal Israeli settlers.
Last week, 7 May 2021, Israeli settlers have submitted their response to the rightful claims of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah to the Israeli court, an apparatus of Israel’s apartheid regime.
The Palestinian families were then given tomorrow, Monday 10 May 2021, to reach an “agreement” with the settlers regarding the right to their homes. Sheikh Jarrah belongs to the Palestinian families. It is part of the occupied Palestinian territory, and therefore any Israeli settler presence in it amounts to a war crime under international law. Israel’s settlement enterprise is an integral part of its apartheid system against all Palestinians.
The Israeli court decision to give a period of time to “both sides” to seek a compromise and reach an agreement is colonial gaslighting. It is also a tactic used to exhaust the ongoing protests and public pressure to #SaveSheikhJarrah. More protests are scheduled to take place over the coming days, and residents vow to remain steadfast.
Watching from afar Israel’s brutal violence against unarmed Palestinian protestors defending their homes and dignity can evoke feelings of anger mixed with powerlessness. We have proven before that collective action in the form of #BDS works best to express true and effective solidarity. Here are 9 actions you can take to fight Israeli impunity and #SaveSheikhJarrah
Take Action:
First, use the power of social media to highlight what is happening. Use #SaveSheikhJarrah in all of your social media posts. Share images and videos from activists in Sheikh Jarrah who are facing social media censorship. Amplify the voices of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah.
Last week Human Rights Watch stated in their groundbreaking report what Palestinians have been saying for decades. Israel is an apartheid state. Now the global consensus is building. Israel’s regime of oppression, including its actions in Sheikh Jarrah, fits the UN definition of apartheid. We can work together to dismantle Israeli apartheid, as global solidarity and boycotts helped to end South African apartheid.Support our campaign and use #UNInvestigateApartheid on social media to add your voice to the global call.
Israeli security companies make millions of dollars in global exports every year by selling goods and services tested on Indigenous Palestinians, including those struggling against ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah. AnyVision’s facial recognition system and NSO’s spying technology are among the most obvious examples of apartheid Israel’s tools of mass surveillance and repression. Israel tries them on Palestinians and exports them to dictatorships and far-right governments worldwide to support their crimes and human rights violations.Pressure your parliament/government to impose a #MilitaryEmbargo against Israel.
G4S and now Allied Universal own a 25% stake in Israel’s national police academy where Israeli police learn brutal & violent repression being used against residents and activists in Sheikh Jarrah. Some of these militarized tactics end up being shared with U.S. and other police forces during joint training.Join our letter-writing campaign and urge Allied Universal executives to divest from Israeli apartheid.On social media use #StopG4S to demand they divest from Israeli apartheid.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Hewlett Packard (HPE and HP) play key roles in Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid against the Indigenous Palestinians. They provide computer systems to the Israeli army and maintain data centres through their servers for the Israeli police who are violently repressing peaceful protestors defending their homes in Sheikh Jarrah.Sign the international pledge and use #BoycottHP on social media.
Basque company CAF is contracted to extend Israel’s Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR) tram service to illegal settlements. Settlements are defined as war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The JLR passes through Sheikh Jarrah where illegal settlers backed by the Israeli state, their military, and police forces, are attempting to ethnically cleanse Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah.Use social media to demand #CAFGetOffIsraelsApartheidTrain
German sportswear manufacturer PUMA sponsors the Israel Football Association, which includes teams and pitches in illegal Israeli settlements, including Givat HaMivtar, just north of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem. Join the campaign launched by 200 Palestinian teams to #BoycottPuma.Share social media actions hijacking PUMA’s #OnlySeeGreat campaign with Palestinians #OnlySeeApartheid.
Boycott all products from Israel’s colonial settlements! Israeli produce like dates and avocados, many of which are produced by companies operating in settlements, can be found in local supermarkets. Demand your supermarket to stop stocking them.
International action can help stop Israel in its tracks. Email or call the elected officials in your country and urge them to adopt Human Rights Watch findings on Israeli apartheid and, crucially, its recommendations to condition all relations with Israel on dismantling its apartheid regime.
HOW RURAL ELECTRIC COOPERATIVES CAN SUPPORT A GREEN NEW DEAL
By Wan R. Smith and Philip Fracica, Nonprofit Quarterly.
May 13, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/how-rural-electric-cooperatives-can-support-a-green-new-deal/
Today, as President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure bill is debated in Congress, it’s worth recalling that this isn’t the first time the US has faced an infrastructure deficit. “By the 1930s nearly 90 percent of US urban dwellers had electricity, but 90 percent of rural homes were without power. Investor-owned utilities often denied service to rural areas, citing high development costs and low profit margins,” recalls one account.
The policy response: rural electric cooperatives (RECs). In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 7037, establishing the Rural Electrification Administration—today’s Rural Utility Service (RUS)—which provided low-cost loans to co-ops to wire rural America; by 1953, 90 percent of rural Americans had power.
There is a lesson in this—and it is not just the power of the cooperative business model to solve problems, although that is important. Indeed, as NPQ has covered, RECs can play a key role today to close the rural-urban broadband gap. But there is a lesson about politics, too, because it is worth asking how RECs became the dominant form of electric provision in rural America. Turns out there is a century-and-a-half-old tradition of progressive organizing in rural America.
Some readers may recall that today’s public bank movement, which aims to create city- and state-owned entities that can hold and invest public funds and remove them from Wall Street banks, is seeking to follow a playbook the Bank of North Dakota has used since 1919. And that entity wouldn’t exist but for a quasi-socialist political party known as the Nonpartisan League that won power in the state in the late 1910s. Co-op organizing, too, is part of this rural radical tradition, and co-ops even today retain a central organizing role in much of rural America, including in agriculture.
It was because of this tradition that when the opportunity to get loans from the federal government to create electric co-ops arrived in the 1930s, the co-op form resonated. Farmers, ranchers, and other community members readily took advantage to wire isolated rural areas. Henry Wallace, an Iowan who served as the Agriculture secretary and would become a kind of Bernie Sanders-type figure and later run for president on a third-party ticket in 1948 and garner over a million votes, oversaw the startup of the loan and technical assistance support programs in Washington. But REC-led electrification in rural America wouldn’t have happened without the commitment and vision from the residents who organized themselves into cooperatives, applied for the loans, and literally put up the poles and lines in their communities. These bold actions brought light, energy, and endless opportunities to their communities by creating electric co-ops that were owned by the residents they served.
Today, there are about 900 RECs located in 47 states that provide electric power (and sometimes broadband and other services) to 42 million people. And yet, what started as community members working together and seizing opportunities to make life better for their families has largely calcified into a system of aging governing boards protected by practices that disenfranchise voters.
To build a basis for green power generation in rural America is an organizing challenge, just as much as it is a technical challenge of closing polluting facilities and replacing them with new facilities that generate renewable-sourced power.
The Slow Demise Of The Spirit Of Cooperation In RECs
Cooperatives throughout the world operate according to seven basic principles: (1) voluntary and open membership, (2) democratic member control, (3) member economic participation, (4) autonomy and independence, (5) education, training and information (6) cooperation among cooperatives, and (7) concern for community.
Adherence to the spirit of these principles allowed RECs to boom for decades and improved the quality of life for the people they served—not just by providing electricity, but also by being investors in local community economic development.
Yet today we find in RECs high consumer bills, a lack of racial diversity in board positions, a lack of access to simple technologies such as broadband internet, and dirty energy production that has negative health and climate implications. For example, 60 percent of co-op power comes from coal, compared to 30 percent for all other electric utilities. To make matters worse, these plants are underperforming and are more costly to member-owners, as opposed to a more diversified generation portfolio that non-cooperative utilities are actively pursuing across the country. Far from leading the green power revolution, RECs are green power laggards.
And while there are many positive exceptions, RECs have often fallen short in investing in the local economy. From the bluegrass of Kentucky to the plains of Texas and beyond, rural residents suffer due to structural racism and systems that value profit over low-income households. More than 90 percent of the “persistent poverty” counties in the US are served by RECs. Around 250 RECs serve Native American nations. Most rural Black communities are served by electric cooperatives as well.
RECs are by statute democratic organizations, but in many RECs, internal democracy has atrophied. Too often, co-op member-owners find themselves unable to attend board meetings, review financials, participate in board elections, or even influence energy policy within their co-ops. As result, an insular “good ol’ boys” network often emerges to fill the power vacuum.
This lack of member participation has real-world effects. The further co-op leaders stray from centering the voices of member-owners, the greater the challenges co-op members face. These include high energy cost burdens, boards that don’t reflect the race and gender demographics of the community served, and mounting shortfalls in local weatherization and energy-efficiency performance.
The Emergence Of The Rural Power Coalition
While decay took decades, a new movement for electric co-op democracy is gaining ground. Member-owners are leading the charge across the country in places like the Tennessee Valley, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and Minnesota. The movement’s goals are to foster democracy, implement inclusive energy efficiency programs, and center equity in spaces that are white male–dominated.
Seven organizations in five states have joined forces to pursue this more inclusive vision. These organizations are Appalachian Voices (Virginia); Clean Up the River Environment, or CURE (Minnesota); Kentuckians for the Commonwealth; Mountain Association (also Kentucky); Partnership for Southern Equity (Georgia) Renew Missouri; and the Western Organization of Resource Councils, or WORC (multistate).
This Rural Power Coalition (RPC) first came together in the summer of 2020 to identify how to get creative with the policy window opened by pending COVID-related relief legislation for rural utilities to benefit our communities. As we started to identify how the NRECA (National Rural Electric Cooperative Association)—the national REC trade association—was going use federal resources, we saw a clear opportunity to find out from member-owners themselves how they would like to be helped.
The approach favored by NRECA and lawmakers seeks to prioritize programs like LIHEAP (the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program), which helps reduce member-owner debt and arrears concerns from past due bills. However, we started to realize that regardless of the pandemic, RECs are not in a sustainable economic situation. Instead of giving RECs a bailout to continue to operate their uneconomical fossil-fuel plants, we proposed that the federal government instead condition its bailout of RECs to compel them to transition to a more sustainable operation based on developing new sources of renewable energy.
This movement believes that RECs, if rejuvenated and brought back under member control, are perfectly positioned to address most of their communities’ equity concerns, with equity in this context defined as “creating the conditions that enable just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential.”
To date, we have seen changes occur at over a dozen co-ops. An example of this potential comes from the Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, one of the oldest RECs in the country, based in New Mexico. Member-owners discovered their contract with Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, an energy supplier company, was a barrier preventing them from investing in renewable energy. But unlike many of their colleagues, because of successful member organizing, the board of Kit Carson authorized co-op management to pay a fee and exit the contract. The co-op now has a contract with Guzman Renewable Energy Partners, which will allow the co-op to meet its clean energy goals.
Envisioning A New Federal-REC Partnership
Currently, NRECA is lobbying in Congress for passage of a bill called the Flexible Financing for Rural America Act. The proposed bill effectively is a $10 billion request to refinance existing co-op debt with RUS at lower rates without penalty.
This proposal does not go far enough, because it does not provide any incentives to transition to cleaner power and provides no guarantee that co-op members would share in the benefits. In essence, RECs are seeking relief from the federal government to continue operating while a record number of member-owners are behind on their bills and nearly two-thirds of their power supply depends on coal.
In response, in February, RPC members penned a joint open letter—cosigned by several dozen organizational supporters—that outlined both what resources are required and what commitments RECs must make in return for federal support. The measure we outlined would directly benefit millions of cooperative member-owners who are currently struggling to pay their bills, while committing RECs to invest in converting power from coal plants to renewable sources.
The voice of RPC has been heard in Washington, DC. President Biden’s American Jobs Plan currently includes $10 billion to retire REC-owned coal plants and replace them with clean energy. While $10 billion will help this program get off the ground, we need ten times that amount—or $100 billion—to complete the transition away from REC-owned fossil plants. There are currently 300 fossil-fuel-based generators operated by the RECs which accounts for over 57 Gigawatts of total capacity from these facilities. It is not going to be cheap to close these plants and enable local communities to reinvest after their closure.
The RPC member-owner proposal also calls for reforms to the RUS Hardship Loan program to empower RECs to center economic and environmental justice in their work. Specifically, this plan would direct $100 billion to RECs in exchange for forgiving residential utility bills that are in arrears, continuing to deliver power to low-income Americans, and delivering more renewably sourced energy to rural households. This investment would directly mitigate some of the economic hardship many rural people face today and jump-start infrastructure projects that will create hundreds if not thousands of good-paying jobs. Currently, many RECs are stuck paying debt on outdated and expensive coal assets. This cost gets passed down to member-owners in the form of higher monthly bills. Modifying RUS repayment rules would enable these cooperatives to afford the cost of shutting down their aging coal plants and transition to a more sustainable portfolio that invests in solar, wind, and energy efficiency.
Why Co-Op Democracy Can Contribute To A Green New Deal
As was true when RECs were established in the Great Depression, the success of RECs today requires active member-owner participation and the support of those who are committed to closing the rural-urban renewable energy divide. Small cities and rural towns know the perpetual cycle of being left behind all too well. But by working together, we can set forth a more positive path. Now is the time for a just transition. As more communities take back their co-ops, the nation’s network of RECs can become models of hope, investment, and prosperity once again. And rural America can become full partners in the transition in power generation from coal to renewable sources that must occur if our country is to meet its carbon emission reduction goals.
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