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The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) is Federal legislation that would remove the many barriers that have driven down union membership.  This bill has already passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and President Biden says he supports it.  Now we must pressure the Senate to pass it.

With the power of the working class organized we can demand a Green New Deal and a just transition to a clean economy that works for all.

https://www.dsausa.org/proact/

The year was 1970, and the Black Panthers had sent the FBI, and now the State Department into a whirlwind of panic. Rumor had spread across the embassies that the Black Panther Party was in Jordan agitating the country against Jewish people in Israel. Huey Newton called a press conference to clarify: the rumor was not quite true, Kwame Ture was in Jordan, but not as a representative of the Black Panther Party, and they had no grievance against the Jewish people. But what was happening was something far more formidable: one of the most fearsome socialist organizations in the US had been operating with an international consciousness.

Whether or not a grassroots movement is able to assent to international anti-imperialism has become an infamous bellwether on the left ever since the imperialist turn of the Social Democratic Parties in Europe. As World War I broke out across the continent, Lenin and Luxemburg warned that this was a war among imperial powers for control over resources that would be wrong to support, but the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and other European socialist parties most directly influenced by Marx and Engels, decided to betray them and each other by choosing nationalism and voting for war credits to finance the war, demonstrating how a socialism organization even with the best intentions can be bended into a tool of capitalism and the state if their politics are not fully anti-imperialist. How much will Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez be willing to reduce the defense budget and withdraw US troops at the expense of their electability in the largest empire in the world? How much would the protestors who turned out against police brutality in the US be willing to turn out against Duterte’s lethal Anti-Terror Law in the Philippines? Every solidarity movement as it grows faces challenges to the limits of its solidarity that it must meet if it is to continue to unite the oppressed against their oppressor.

“We support the Palestinians’ just struggle for liberation one hundred percent,” announced Huey Newton at the conference, “we will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.” The Black Panthers had been in daily correspondence with the Palestine Liberation Organization, via Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, who had traveled there fleeing US Law Enforcement. In about a year’s time, the Black Panthers had written and distributed 33 different articles on this topic in their newspaper, the Black Panther. 

But undoubtedly the most meaningful result of Black Panther’s relationship with Palestinian solidarity came with a militant Anti-Zionist organization which formed amongst Mizrahi youth in Israel in 1971. The Mizrahi are Jews who originated from Middle East and North Africa who were therefore both are Arab and Jewish, and as such have been treated as second-class citizens in Israel, above Muslim Palestinians citizens of Israel but below the European descended Ashkenazi Jews. Second-generation Mizrahim living in the slums of Musrara would learn of socialist movements from the revolutionary Matzpen movement organizing in Israel, and from these conditions the Mizrahi Black Panthers were born.

What’s beautiful about the Mizrahi Black Panthers is that rather than merely fighting for their own rights as Israeli Jews, they found common cause with their fellow Palestinian Arabs in Israel, who often lived in the same neighborhoods as them and faced similar problems of harassment and brutality by the police. They organized public demonstrations, often facing arrests from the police, including disrupting the World Zionist Congress of 1972 and organizing a hunger strike at the Western Wall which forced a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister. In what they had termed “Operation Milk,” milk bottles were stolen from rich Ashkenazi neighborhoods and given to poor Mizrahi families in need, along with incendiary literature explaining why this had been done. While they didn’t always necessarily identify as an Anti-Zionist or an Anti-Imperialist movement, their actions and their outlook situated themselves and the Palestinians against the Zionist state which to them was indistinguishable from the “white tribe” Ashkenazi supremacy of their condition.

At the press conference, Huey Newton had said, in what would later get published as “On the Middle East” that the Black Panther Party would “[n]ot just stand in international solidarity with all peoples oppressed by white supremacy but international resistance against all whom we understand to be the bodyguards of capital.” But how was it that it came to be that a movement that began in 1966 as two activists in Oakland arming and organizing black residents to defend themselves against police violence would be publicly declaring international opposition against all of capitalist imperialism in just four short years? What is it that they did or saw that we can learn from by their example? 

The first thing to note about the Black Panther Party’s solidarity with the Palestinians is that it was only a part of a rich relationship between Palestine and the broader Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm X was a significant champion of the Palestinian cause, on a personal level having been connected to the Arab world as a member of the Nation of Islam as well as ideologically as an anti-imperialist revolutionary, visiting Gaza in 1964. Malcolm X’s fight for black liberation extended to all non-whites oppressed by Western imperial power, not just African-Americans living in the US. Like Malcom, Kwame Ture’s concept of Black Power was also internationalist, explaining that “[w]hen you talk of black power, you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.” As chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Ture wrote a 1967 article drawing parallels between the black civil rights struggle in the US with the Palestinians rights struggle in Israel and staged a demonstration at a leftist conference to demand adoption of a resolution condemning Zionism.

While Ture and Newton both supported what they recognized as Palestinian Nationalism against the state of Israel, Newton felt it necessary to draw a distinction between a sort of alliance amongst oppressed peoples towards seperatism characteristic of Ture’s Pan-Africanism and his own conditional nationalism aligned not strictly by race but by the struggle against capitalist imperialism, stating “This transformation can only take place by wiping out United States imperialism and establishing a new earth, a new society, a new world. So politically and strategically the correct action to take is not separation but world revolution in order to wipe out imperialism. Then people will be free to decide their destiny. Self-determination and national liberation can not really exist while United States imperialism is alive. That is why we don’t support nationalism as our goal.”

And it must have seemed (more than usual) that these were particularly international times. It was the midst of the cold war and countries and conflicts were literally being categorized by their relation to Western Imperialism and Communism. More importantly, it was the midst of the Vietnam War. The most unpopular war in US history had been opposed by the Black Panthers  from the very start, including an anti-war plank in its original Ten-Point Platform, stating “We want all Black men to be exempt from military service. We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America.” The next year, the draft began and the number of deployed troops reached half a million.

At the same time this was a pivotal moment for the Israel-Palestine conflict in particular: in June of 1967 came the Six-Day War. It took less than a week for Israel to pre-emptive strike Egypt and much of Syria’s air force and drive out Egyptian and Jordanian forces on the ground until the UN came in to broker a cease-fire. The result was the entirety of historic Palestine became occupied by Israel, with a million Palestinians now living under Israeli rule and hundreds of thousands more fleeing as refugees. Unlike the relatively static occupation of this decade, the burgeoning party would have seen the nation of Palestine effectively wiped from the map in real-time.

Another essential aspect of the anti-imperialist politics of the Panthers, of course, was the anti-imperialist teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao whom as revolutionaries their leadership ascribed to. While Marx set the economic basis for describing the exploitation of Capitalism, it was Lenin who saw in particular its relation to Imperialism, describing it as the highest stage of the Capitalism system. Mao took this philosophy of Marxist-Leninism and recontextualised it outside of the West – first, as a “semi-colonial” country facing imperial aggression from Japan, later, as a Communist power facing aggression from the US. The result was militant political organizing conducted with a awe-inspiring combination of revolutionary zeal and analytical clarity, as illustrated here by Fred Hampton “We’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state attorneys with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reaction when all working people get together and have an international proletarian revolution.”

The sources of the Black Panther Party’s revolutionary ideas appear to have come from a variety of places. From the first, the Black Panthers saw themselves picking up after the work of another revolutionary, Malcom X, who was assassinated a year before their founding. But for the Panther’s Maoism also wasn’t a historical matter, they could see these principals in motion in China and Vietnam. They also drew inspiration from the Cuban revolution as well as the Marxist and decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon. By Assata Skakur’s account, “I wasn’t against communism, but i can’t say i was for it either. At first, i viewed it suspiciously, as some kind of white man’s concoction, until i read works by African revolutionaries and studied the African liberation movements. Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of white colonists, if they didn’t rid themselves of the capitalist economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists.” On the other hand, George Jackson simply stated “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.”

Among these factors which help explain the international character of the Black Panthers, the one I find most compelling is the simplest one: the Black Panthers and Palestinians both faced struggles which they could recognize in each other. The Black Panthers were founded as a community solution to police violences and began their first published article demanding justice for the police killing of Denzil Dowell. In Palestine, there were 48 people killed by Israeli officers enforcing curfew in Kafr Qassem and the Wadi Salin riots protesting the police killing of a Mizrahi Jewish man. At a time when black people in America relocated to escape the legacy of slavery a racial enmity in the rural South and faced the impacts of redlining in ghettos, Palestinians and Mizrahim faced displacement from Israeli troops and slums. While Huey Newton compared the black experience in America to a colonial occupation of Palestine, a Palestinian liberation leader reflecting on Huey Newton would compare the oppression of the Palestinians to the the US incarceration system. While the location, context, and degree of these struggles may vary between the two peoples, it is undeniable they struggled against much of the same problems, in truth both struggling against different facets of the same problem of racist and imperialist capitalist systems. The Black Panthers direct experience with this oppression and with this struggle, fundamentally, is not something that would require a textbook to explain.

Perhaps the political and organizational legacy of the Black Panther Party in the United States can best be seen today in the Black Lives Matter movement, arguably the most influential racial civil rights and police abolition movement since the Civil Rights Era, and Democratic Socialists of America, arguably the most influential socialist organization of this generation. What guidance can we offer these movements on how they can stay the course of international solidarity? In the case of Palestine at least there is some reason for optimism; in 2016 the Movement for Black Lives released a statement in support of the Palestinian struggle as part of their platform and in 2019 the DSA passed a resolution in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement. But the lesson I believe we can take from the Black Panther Party on internationalism is to study the movements that came before you, pay attention to the world events happening around you, study the revolutionary theorists of the past and present, but above all engage meaningfully in the struggle for liberation. To catch a panther cub you must enter the panther’s lair — there is no greater teacher on the contours of our shared political struggles than the material reality of the struggle itself.

References

• “The Black Panther Party and Palestine Solidarity,” Matthew Quest
• “Ninetieth anniversary of the German SPD voting for War,” World Socialist Web Site
• “The long history of Black and Palestinian solidarity,” Liberation School
• “The New Left and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the United States,” Michael R Fischbach
• “When Israel’s Black Panthers found common cause with Palestinians,” The Electronic Intifada
• “’Our ideology is our pain’: Notes of an Israeli Black Panther”, +972 Mag
• “Rediscovering Huey P. Newton’s ‘On the Middle East’”, Workers Youth United
• “A historical framework for continued Black-Palestinian solidarity,” Mondoweiss
• “Stokely Carmichael,” History.com
• “A Huey Newton Story,” PBS
• “Vietnam War Protests,” History.com
• “Six-Day War,” Britannica
• “Vanishing Palestine,” Palestine Remix 
• “The communism of the Black Panther Party,” Redflag
• “50 years later – What can the Black Panther Party teach a new generation of revolutionaries?”
• “‘How do you organize that rage’: A podcast on policing and protest from The Oaklandside and East Bay Yesterday,” The Oaklandside
• “We’ll never forget October 1956 massacre, say Palestinians in Israel,” The electronic Intifada
• “Redlining,” Black Past
• “Great Migration: The African American Exodus North,” NPR’s Fresh Air
• “Why The Black Panther Party & Palestine Solidarity Is Still Relevant Today,” Black Lives Matter Alliance of Broward
• “Democratic Socialists of America BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group,” DSA

Voting for our officer election has concluded. Results are in, and we’re pleased to announce nine new officers for the Silicon Valley chapter of DSA! Join our first chapter meeting with them this Sunday, April 18th at 2pm. All are welcome to come meet the officers and ask questions!

Now is a great time to get more involved with DSA. Our committees could use a hand! Do you have interest in any of these areas?

• Communications: From social media to newsletters (hi!), our Comms Committee helps make sure our membership is aware of upcoming events, actions, and internal decisions. From writing to design, we’d love your help spreading the word.
• Outreach: Help bring DSA to local communities with the Outreach Committee. Seek out other organizations to partner with, share flyers in your area, and more.
• Agendas & Meeting Planning: Our AMP Committee is responsible for keeping things running smoothly — making sure all of the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed for upcoming meetings. Help keep our meetings as accessible as possible.
• Tech and Data: Want to build software to facilitate activism? Develop the chapter website? Ensure safe use of membership data? Join our Tech and Data Committee to help with the chapter’s technical structure.
• : Our goal is to make sure all comrades feel welcome in DSA spaces, whether they’re new to the movement, recently moved to the area, have been busy with other obligations, or are fully involved members. MDC helps to make sure you’re oriented, you get your questions answered, and you know where you can dive in.
• Finance and Inventory: This committee is responsible for confirming that our books are kept up-to-date and making sure we know what funds and resources are available — both critical aspects to enabling our work (from mutual aid to swag and beyond!).
• : Our newly-formed Social Committee is responsible for planning (virtual) events to bring our community together. If you have a fun idea, join the first meeting on Wednesday!

No experience required. Come to an upcoming meeting or to learn more!

In solidarity,
Your SV DSA Newsletter Team

The post Newsletter – 2021-04-12 appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

On Sunday, April 11th, the members of Charlotte Metro DSA voted to endorse the National DSA Pass the PRO Act Campaign. The full text of the resolution is available below.

As a top national priority, DSA is embarking on a national campaign to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act). This transformative legislation gives power to unions to organize workers and overturns many anti-labor rulings handed down by the Supreme Court. Most importantly, it roots out racist and unjust labor practices, like right-to-work laws, and guarantees that immigrant workers have the same rights afforded to their fellow workers. DSA is joining a national coalition led by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), a union that is majority people of color, who has been leading the push. DSA’s National Political Committee is preparing to support DSA chapters in every state as we fight side by side with workers everywhere from now until May Day (Biden's 100th day in office) to force the president and federal elected officials to make this legislation a reality.

President Biden has made climate one of his key priorities in office. In his first week in office, he’s already re-entered the Paris Agreement and cancelled the Keystone pipeline. These steps re-establish the status quo of Obama’s presidency. But more importantly, the new administration's emphasis on climate, along with more socialists in Congress, creates openings for DSA to push for key legislative priorities. There is also a common desire among both labor and the left to not repeat 2008, when Obama was allowed to back down on his promises, leading to the Republican wave in 2010. 

We can only win transformative reforms like the Green New Deal with a much stronger, radicalized, and organized working class. To that end, DSA’s national Green New Deal (GND) campaign and Democratic Socialist Labor Commission (DSLC) are convening a central push for the First 100 Days of the new administration to pass the PRO Act (Protect the Right to Organize), which would strengthen unions and the power of the working class to organize on the job, helping to build labor power as strong as it needs to be in the months and years ahead to win a just transition to a green economy for all workers, especially in building power toward GND demands like a federal jobs guarantee that can function as socialist “non-reformist reforms.” The original New Deal was won through militant labor organizing — rebuilding this capacity is crucial to the theory of power DSA’s national GND campaign has developed for a radical Green New Deal.

Towards that end, Charlotte Metro DSA proposes to work within our chapter to mobilize members around the PRO Act, which would begin with emphasizing that passing this legislation is a first key demand within a larger campaign strategy to win a Green New Deal. We will coordinate our chapter with the broader DSA national initiative, laying the groundwork for future efforts strengthening connections between labor and climate justice. 

Goals:

• Align DSA members around a labor-oriented strategy for climate organizing;

• Advance a pro-labor narrative for DSA’s climate organizing, internally and externally;

• Connect with and activate DSA union members to participate in a strategic and federally-targeted DSA campaign;

• Activate non-union worker members within DSA around the demand of the PRO Act;

• Increase DSA members’ capacity/skills to carry out strategic organizing work with  federal targets in a strategic nationwide campaigns;

• Work with Labor WG to ID union members and non-union members in key sectors that would be affected by PRO for mobilization, laying the groundwork for possible future GND-related organizing with local labor unions;

• Support chapter targeting of local unions who could be brought into coalition around the PRO Act and facilitate longer-term relationship building with labor. 

To this end, we are proposing these chapter efforts for the first 100 days of the Biden administration:

• Plan public-facing political education events around the role of organized labor and the PRO Act in winning a Green New Deal;

• Mobilize members for national webinars around PRO Act and the role of organized labor in a just transition;

• Participate in DSA national phone banks with auto-dialer campaign to pressure key Reps in Congress, especially in strategic states and districts with Reps and Senators to be moved in key states like Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, Colorado, and Arizona;

• The National GND campaign is developing a congressional tracking sheet with IUPAT to identify priority targets. We will work across our chapter to determine interest and capacity to organize against any priority targets in our jurisdiction;

• Adapt national social media campaign materials for targets in our region;

• Plan public action(s) locally around PRO Act, along with the national campaign and local labor allies (including a possible May Day action). These can include rallies, sit-ins, escalating nonviolent direct action, etc. based on capacity and risk factors for participating members and allies.

Interested members can sign up for the national campaign in this form! 

http://bit.ly/dsaproact 

The Madison Area chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America applauds the students at Altoona High School who organized a walkout in response to a return to in-person learning in the middle of a global pandemic. We stand with them in their fight for a safe learning environment.

Students at Altoona describe close confines that prevent adequate social distancing and a lack of trust in an administration that failed to consult with students about the plan to return. Many high school students are under sixteen and are therefore still ineligible for COVID-19 vaccination, putting them at a heightened risk of contracting the virus. That risk is greater than ever as new, more contagious variants become dominant in the United States and as new COVID-19 cases are climbing again throughout Wisconsin. 

Altoona High School administrators should listen to their students whose concerns about school reopenings are shared by leading epidemiologists, including those who once supported school reopening but have changed their minds due to the severity of the new COVID-19 variants. Our country and our state is on the cusp of a new wave of COVID-19 cases and unvaccinated students in crowded classrooms are directly in the line of fire. 

Throughout the pandemic, Madison Area DSA has stood with people fighting to reject unsafe conditions, mainly workers in our region. We recognize the Altoona Student walkout as a part of this same struggle. No one should be forced to risk their health and safety or the health and safety of vulnerable family members for a paycheck – or for a grade. As socialists, we believe that people should have the right to collectively determine the conditions in which they work and learn.

We are pleased to announce our third issue of our quarterly magazine, What’s Left!

In This Issue

• Peorty Selection for National Poetry Month: Spring in New Hampshire, by Claude McKay (1889-1948)
• Domestic Labor and the Capitalist State
• Socialist Feminism of the 21st Century
• The Struggle Continues: Reflections on GR Organizers Past Present and Future
• Michigan Stagehands Rally for Unemployment Benefits and Jobs – FightBackNews.org
• Say Yes To Michigan! An Imagined Future if We Pursue Alternative Energy

The post What’s Left – Issue #3 – April 2021 appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

To get involved with the campaign for Public Power: http://ecosocialists.nyc/  and https://www.nypublicpower.com/

To get involved with the Internet for All campaign: internetforall.nyc/join

 CW: mentions of suicide

Nevada’s education is a disaster.

According to recent statistics, Nevada ranks among the “least educated” states. In 2015, the state scored 50th of 51 in total K-12 education assessment. To anyone who grew up in Las Vegas, this is not even remotely surprising. This is not a new phenomenon. In my high school, between 2011 and 2015, we celebrated whenever Nevada climbed from 50th to 49th in overall ranking in public education nationwide.

Politicians always bang the drum of education reform, but marginal fixes do nothing to address the root issue. The constant failure of education reform is a consequence of a lack of political backbone to take on the central political force of austerity in Nevada: the mining industry. Education has everything to do with taxing the mines. If we want to fix education in Nevada, we must understand how the mining industry exacerbates the systems of oppression that contribute to the problems in our public education system. The mining industry has so far escaped paying its taxes with devastating consequences for democracy, Indigenous sovereignty, the environment, and social services – including education.

Take mental health as an example.

Teachers are often forced to fill a state-created void of mental health services.  In the Clark County School District, the ratio of students to school psychologists is about 2200:1. The recommended ratio is 500:1. The complete dearth of mental health professionals in Las Vegas schools makes many students seek help from mentor figures they form connections with in the classroom. Teachers are compelled structurally to assume far more responsibilities than their job description dictates in the mental health needs of their students. They often perform and expect an overwhelming amount of extra labor to make up for the lack of psychological professionals. That is despite the fact that their labor is already undervalued and underpaid. That is an unfair burden on teachers that significantly decreases their capacity – both emotional and physical. Instead of enjoying time off after work, I witnessed my teachers in their classrooms several hours after school-bells rang huddled with classmates who may have harmed themselves if left alone that night. That burden on teachers is a direct result of underfunded social services.

Not only are teachers forced into extra labor by the chronic underfunding of our schools, but students are also impacted. The mental health needs of students can easily fall through the cracks of a broken system, a fact that is particularly the case for students from marginalized communities. Nevada’s public education is abysmal across the state, but it is no coincidence which schools are the worst hit by chronic underfunding’s impact on mental health: schools with majority-Black student populations and schools in Tribal communities. Nevada is a “majority minority” state, and racial discrimination is linked to worse mental health. Certain municipal institutions are hotbeds of racial discrimination, like the Las Vegas Metro, which harms the mental health of city residents all the more. Las Vegas has the highest proportion of undocumented immigrants nationwide, forced to live in fear of state-sponsored violence enacted upon them. Studies also show that the kids of undocumented parents receive healthcare at significantly lower rates than the national average. Poverty is linked to lower school achievement and more mental health disorders in both childhood and adulthood, and concentrated poverty is most extreme in Nevada’s communities of color. Las Vegas’s workforce is a precariat of service workers who work odd hours for the casinocracy that exploits them, and leaves many kids without parental support for large segments of the day.

Urban sprawl exacerbates the mental health issues endemic in Las Vegas public schools, as well. Social isolation, linked to worse mental health, is increased by long commute times. These longer commute times are invariably present in a school district without sufficient school buses and awful public transit – both of which are proven to be linked to the racist and classist system. “Black and Brown people comprise a disproportionate share of public transit’s ridership base,” which means that Black and Brown people are impacted at greater rates by underfunded transit and urban sprawl itself.

Even after students and teachers arrive in school, they may be forced to learn and work in facilities with harsh environmental conditions. I attended class in the Vegas heat – which can reach upwards of 100 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit – with no AC in portable classrooms holding up to fifty students for substantial parts of my school life in Clark County. This environment is clearly not conducive to an effective educational environment, and yet that was our daily reality. My high school’s student population was 90% children of color. Students arrive from long commutes at school, sleep-deprived, with all of the negative impacts of sprawl already enacted after leaving homes where they may face financial instability or abuse or live in fear of state-sponsored violence. They arrive at school to study in classrooms with facilities that are broken down and – quite plausibly – may not even qualify as sufficient by the standards of international human rights, sweating, trying to learn about U.S. history from a curriculum that largely erases the stories of their families and their communities in favor of the stories told by white settler elites, at small desks their might share with other students. They may go the entire year unnoticed by an overworked teacher just as they are unnoticed by the counselor, by the administrator, by the system. The COVID-19 pandemic has only worsened these circumstances.

No one I knew did not suffer from mental health issues. Many had undiagnosed mental illnesses that plagued them, or from which they had no escape. Many sought help from apps, but apps cannot replace sufficient mental health care. Some of my friends killed themselves. Every single death and untreated mental illness was aided and abetted by woefully insufficient school funding and the de facto abandonment of Nevada’s students by state budgets.

All of these factors lead to one conclusion: Underfunding schools is deadly. The mines have blood on their hands. Our economy isn’t boom-and-bust anymore; it’s stumble-and-bust, at best. Whether we are in central Las Vegas or in Northtown or on the Eastside or on a reservation, we survive in conditions created by defunded public services like education. Minerals have more rights than teachers or students. They have since Nevada became a state.

Since the beginning, the mining industry has taken advantage of Nevadan suffering for its own profits. Nevada is the fifth largest producer of gold in the world. As per the Nevada Constitution, the mining industry cannot be taxed beyond a cap of five percent on net proceeds. That constitution was largely written with the ink of Big Mining. When the constitution was first drafted, the arrogance of the California-owned mining companies that sought to exploit Nevada’s resources failed when settler Nevada voters decided against the first proposed constitution. Then, an infamous bust occurred and Nevadan voters “yearned to be rescued by the only thing that they thought could save them, investment from … California corporations and financiers.” The mining industry capitalized on the bust to secure their tax exemption in the Nevada Constitution and benefit from economic collapse.

The fact that Big Mining used a bust to write themselves the tax exemption makes the train of argument from mining industry lobbyists particularly ironic. At the recent IndyTalks session where progressive champion and PLAN executive director Laura Martin faced mining lobbyist Jim Wadhams, Wadhams defended the taxation cap on the grounds that the mining industry does experience recession. The mines do bust; thus, they should not be taxed at a higher rate. However, since the bust part of the mining industry’s economic cycle was the catalyst for mining to receive its much-desired tax cap to begin with, the industry has no moral ground to stand on in weaponizing that very fact to defend the unjustifiable exemption. Big Mining cannot pretend history does not exist if Nevadans remember.

Another argument that the mines use to defend their role in defunding Nevada is that mining does pay other taxes. As the executive director of the Nevada Mining Association argued to the Pahrump Valley News, “the industry, like other businesses, also pays property, sales and payroll taxes.” The same talking point was repeated by Wadhams in the recent IndyTalks session. However, as Laura Martin pointed out, that does not actually capture the full picture of the generous deductions that the mining industry feasts upon that small businesses are not qualified for. Mining is uniquely positioned as the only industry in the state that is constitutionally exempt from any real obligation to Nevadan communities. Instead of paying into our public services, Nevadans foot the bill for cleanup costs, costs of development, corporate services, royalties paid if on a lease, and healthcare benefits. “We are paying for their healthcare,” Martin said. “It’s just mining. No other business gets to enjoy so many deductions. [The mining industry] basically saves $5 billion in taxes owed to the state.”

Mining has an arsenal of arguments steeped in business language and buzzwords, but the simple fact is that mining is legally protected from adequately compensating the state for its heinous activities. We don’t need to get in the weeds. The mines exploit Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe land at the expense of Nevadans – particularly the poorest. We have the fifth most regressive tax structure in the nation, by virtue of Big Mining. As Ian Bigley wrote in the Nevada Current, “Nevadans making less than $20,500 a year pay over 10 percent of their daily income in taxes, while the mining industry pays less than 1 percent of their gross income into the state general fund.” In other words, the poorest Nevadans pay nearly ten times their proportionate worth compared to the entire mining industry. That is by the design of the mining industry that held Nevada legislators’ hands in writing the NV Constitution.

Mining does everything to keep it this way. Sweet, reasonable rhetoric voiced from lobbyists is only one of their weapons. Mining, as the “only game in town,” lobbies and fills the coffers that support key politicians. Nevada Gold Mines donated half a million dollars to the Home Means Nevada PAC, affiliated with Governor Sisolak, in advance of the current legislative session where NV Constitution amendments to tax the mines are on the table.

Meanwhile, mining lobbyists slander legislators that dare to ask the mines to pay their share with the label “eco-terrorists.” That keeps legislators who are early in their terms from criticizing the mines due to fear of retaliation. According to Laura Martin, first-time legislators will often say they “don’t want to cross mining.” The mines delight in maintaining that fear to protect their profits. I witnessed this culture of fright first-hand. When I walked through a government building in the early 2010s, a lawmaker told me about the influence of mining only in a whisper. The industry was untouchable. Mining is a quiet behemoth exerting tremendous influence through a tax exemption they bullied Nevadans to accept 160 years ago.

The fact that our elected officials fear the mining industry’s power demonstrates the extent of their political influence. By constitutional writ, the mines are immune to their democratic obligations to communities and act as a fundamentally undemocratic force on Nevada’s political culture by counteracting our votes with both money and a potential for retaliation that is hung over the heads of Nevadans. Mining not only retaliates against elected officials, but regular residents as well. “We get messages [from people that live near active mines] all the time, [asking how they] can contact their legislator without the mining industry finding out because [their] uncle works there,” Martin indicated in the IndyTalks session. That is doubly true for Native communities who have been compelled to coexist with the mines.

Even while encouraging fear, the mining industry pollutes and poisons the land with particular consequences for Indigenous people. “Every waterway — springs, streams, all these watersheds — these mines are operating and damaging our water resources; not only that, but our environment, the survival of all people,” said Shoshone Paiute Tribal Chairman Brian Thomas of Duck Valley. Shawn Collins, a Western Shoshone former employee of the mining industry, discussed in Tainted Thirst how, at the hands of mining, the areas where Shoshones used to camp –  a site where Native elders are buried – was the exact location that the corporation destroyed to build a mine: “they tore up my country, my family’s country.” Meanwhile, the Yerington Paiute Tribe continues to rely on store-bought water bottles because their land has been poisoned by uranium and arsenic shed by the Anaconda Copper Mine. Changes in clean-up were decided in 2019 by a company based on new science, but no notification was given to the tribe. While the mines have made improvements in decreasing contamination caused by their operations relative to decades ago, the fact that the industry continues to avoid paying adequate taxes shows that even the barest form of reparations for crimes against Indigenous people on their own land remain unpaid.

In fact, exploitation of the land at Indigenous people’s expense has been the resulting impact of mining interests since the inception of those interests in Nevada. The only treaty between the United States and an Indigenous Nation in Nevada, the Treaty of Ruby Valley (1863), was written to guarantee free rein for mining to exploit the land at all costs.

While Native people are disproportionately impacted by the mining industry’s operations, the environment itself suffers severe degradation. Where pit lakes form in vacated mining sites, “toxic stews” of melted metals generate acid into a “circular chain reaction of perpetual pollution.” There is a great deal of water in Nevada’s earth, but the mines disrupt natural water flows. The environmental consequences are long-lasting. The Anaconda Copper Mine in Yerington ceased operations decades ago, but clean-up of the plume generated by operations was initially announced to require up to 285 years to “remove the quantity of water necessary to clean up the aquifer.”

Yet, even though that impact directly results from mining, this centuries-long treatment is a responsibility that the profiteers of Big Mining avoid at all costs. ARCO, the company charged with cleaning up Anaconda, has since amended its technical review to only assume responsibility over a much smaller plume zone than it was originally prescribed. That alteration benefits the company, but not the actual process of cleaning up the land poisoned by industry. Meanwhile, mining continues to dewater the environment and impact vital ecosystems by over-appropriating the environment for profit, particularly in locations like the Robinson Mine in White Pine County and in the upper Humboldt River corridor.

Undeniably, the mines harm Nevadans. Ever since the founding of Nevada, the mines have capitalized, giving back little in reparations to the people of the state they exploit. They established a culture of fear among Nevada lawmakers in 1863, and that culture has followed them into 2021. They expect a quid pro quo from legislators who they fund to counteract the needs of the voters who elected those legislators into power. If legislators don’t play their game, they slander them with labels like “eco-terrorist.” They prey on the land with little regard to the impact on Indigenous communities and the environment.

Finally, they stuff their pockets with earnings while public services go underfunded. While many factors contribute to the disastrous Nevada public education system, a large number of them are deeply intertwined with a lack of sufficient funding. Teachers take on additional labor to make up for a dearth of mental health professionals; students resort to mental health apps in lieu of qualified counselors; most students rarely receive one-on-one attention because of oversized classes; students suffer from poverty in classrooms, as well as at home, because of underfunded classrooms; long commutes are made longer by debilitated public transit, which is an effect of underfunding. All of these can contribute to higher drop-out rates and the epidemic of mental illness throughout Nevada schools, culminating in suicides. The consequences of these underfunded public services impact Black and brown students at higher rates than white students, and the mining industry is complicit in every single one of them.

“We do not see our Legislature being as inventive as possible for our kids and for our healthcare in the same way they have been for big business … we shouldn’t have the biggest gold mines and the most underfunded schools in our country,” said Laura Martin in IndyTalks. She is completely correct, as were Nathaniel Phillipps and Courtney Jones when they wrote that “the political imagination of our state does not reflect the severity of oppression under which we live.” The mining industry is a major force striving to prevent the formation of a truly equitable and liberatory political imagination, but only through greater political willpower against the mines can legislators justify deserving our votes. Harry Reid was able to oust the Mob and destroy the forces of organized crime in the city of Las Vegas, but the mines loom untouched by even adequate taxation as democracy is impeded despite our own votes, as Indigenous people suffer without water on their own land, and as Nevadan kids kill themselves in their own schools. AJR1, which would change the tax code to distribute the taxed revenue earned on gross proceeds of minerals to public services like education, is the first step in changing the political imagination of our state and actually making a difference in Nevada education.

Nevadan lives depend on taxing the mines. Pass AJR1.

Use this form to tell your legislators to #TaxTheMines.

The ideology of the current neo-liberal power establishment dictates it will continue to display an ineffective front against and obscure the amount it abets fascist forces. In response, we must more carefully examine the causes of the threat and provide a countervailing force for the people.

Centering policies which actually benefit Black, Indigenous, and people of color has to be at the core of what we do in those efforts considering fascists exploit existing prejudicial structures and attitudes to advance their ideas. This is clear in the Trump administration’s active meddling in anything resembling a proper response to the COVID-19 outbreak, which has disproportionately affected Black and Indigenous Americans.

Right-wing demagogues alone aren’t responsible for the reemergence of fascism in this country, however. James P. Cannon, a political leader and socialist in the early 20th century, argued it emerges as a result of the capitalist society’s untenable nature. It is exploitative and aims only to expropriate value from people and Earth’s resources, naturally creating the discontent that causes fascism to arise.

“Fascism is a product of the crisis of capitalism and can be definitively disposed of only by a solution of this crisis,” Cannon said. “The fascist movement can make advances or be pushed back at one time or another in the course of this crisis; but it will always be there, in latent or active form, as long as the social causes which produce it have not been eradicated.”

The forces which uphold those social causes shift to suit the time and, inherently, capitalism sows inequality among the masses. Racial capitalism is ingrained in all aspects of society. As professor of Black studies and political science Cedric J Robinson wrote, “racialism inevitably permeates the social structures emergent from capitalism.”

This country is a settler-colonial state — an ongoing, over 400-year project focused on subjugating Black and Indigenous people as a means to extract profit. Due to this, the United States’ intimate tie to white supremacy cuts across all economic, social, political and environmental lines. America’s land theft policies and genocide of Indigenous people inspired fascist forces in the 1930s, as did Jim Crow laws.

It’s hard to rationalize the behavior of those who understand these realities and still advocate for the status quo. It’s particularly immoral to push for a shift to a more hyper-nationalistic culture revolving around the unique actors and symbols of American opression.

As we strive to overthrow the existing social and political order, protecting the history of Socialist liberation and fascist resistance fighters is vital in opposition. Historically, “antifa” is not a loose collection of white anarchists, as mainstream media and the political class implies. Black people are the vanguard of antifascism; generally, that holds true for any popular American resistance movement.

Writer Molly Crabapple chronicled a group of Black Americans who supported efforts to drive Italy out of Ethiopia in 1934. In another decisive display of international solidarity, approximately 90 Black Americans fought in the Spanish Civil War — a battle between a socialist/communist dominated coalition government and the revolting fascist belligerents. Communist organizers, such as Canute Frankson, emphasized the importance of the struggle, as a “fight for the preservation of democracy” and “the liberation of my people, and of the human race.” James Yates fought in the war, met supporter Langston Hughes on the front lines, and went on to organize with the Communist Party USA when he returned to the U.S. Thyra Edwards helped refugee resettlement efforts during the war before returning home to continue her writing and activist career.

The United Front Against Fascism conference, organized by Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton in 1969, represents a direct thread between Popular Front organizing efforts of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. With the release of the Judas and the Black Messiah movie, a retelling of Hampton’s assassination, it’s imperative we uphold him and the Black Panther Party as pillars of the Socialist movement within the United States — they were proudly Marxist-Leninist, even though that is obscured by the film.

“Nothing’s more important than stopping fascism,” Hampton said, “because fascism will stop us all.”

The opposing force to fascism and the underlying social causes in which created it has to be socialism. Contributing to mutual aid efforts and fighting to dismantle the carceral state also honors the legacy of the Black Panther Party — a legacy comrade Ahmad Adé helped build. Other members of the party are still unjustly imprisoned after nearly 50 years. Locally, our decarceral efforts include the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty. We can build on that infrastructure to support additional abolitionist policies.

Indigenous liberation groups, such as the American Indian Movement, joined the BPP in coalition work. Modern iterations of this, as a couple comrades wrote, means centering Indigenous futures as a key part of our movement. Supporting Nevada’s Indigenous peoples through organizations such as the Nevada Native Caucus is crucial as we continue to fight capitalist land-grabs of their territory.

Federally, the tepid neo-liberal resistance to and a bipartisan appeasement of the Capitol Insurrection has only served to strengthen the institutions fascists use to exert control. The only way forward is to dismantle the racist, imperialist police state.

With pro-Black and Indigenous liberation, as well as decolonial ideology, policies and forces at the core of our front, we can build a strong left to combat the active threat of fascism.