Editor’s Note: This podcast was originally published by MintPress News.
The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
On May 24, an 18-year-old gunman fatally shot 22 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Police reportedly refused to confront the killer, locked him in a room full of children, physically prevented parents from getting involved, and even allegedly rescued their own children first.
The massacre has once again brought the United States’ unique obsession with firearms to the fore, with renewed calls to ban assault rifles. But even among gun-control advocates, few realize the connections between the Second Amendment and white supremacy.
Today’s guest is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Originally from Oklahoma, Dunbar-Ortiz is a writer, historian and activist, possibly best known for her 2014 classic book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.” She argues that the context behind the Second Amendment is that the newly-independent United States needed “well-regulated militias” of white men to “kill Indians and take their land,” or to form slave patrols that would hunt down Black people fleeing their captivity. It was out of these slave patrols that the first police departments were formed.
Ultimately, she argues, the need for such armed militias arose from the fact that the white colonists were on recently stolen land, surrounded by hostile groups who were trying to get their land back. As she notes, it was a crime to give or sell a gun to a Native American.
An activist for over 50 years, Dunbar-Ortiz has argued that for any progress to be made, Americans must stop worshiping a 234-year-old document written by slaveholders. Today with Lowkey, she also discussed how it was that the National Rifle Association was taken over by reactionary political actors and how it came to be that the United States is a country with 4% of the world’s population but half of the world’s guns.
“The Constitution is so embedded in white supremacy that there is no way to amend it to change that. It is everywhere…This is so obvious if you just face what U.S. history is and not leave so much out,” she told Lowkey.
A revolutionary and a feminist, Dunbar-Ortiz’s life’s work has taken her across the world, including to Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua, where she documented the U.S.-sponsored Contra War against indigenous groups. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay. Among her other notable books include, “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment”; “The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America”; and “Not ‘a Nation of Immigrants’: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion.”
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Cover of Coup, by Linda Farthing and Thomas Becker (2021)
Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia, by Linda Farthing and Thomas Becker (Haymarket Books: Chicago, 2021)
A new book, Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia, provides an in-depth, balanced view of the 2019 coup and the ongoing Bolivian revolutionary process. Journalist Linda Farthing and attorney Thomas Becker’s 306-page book evaluates the balance of class forces that led to the coup, as well as the anti-imperialist forces who were ultimately able to repel it and seize political power again in the plurinational state of 11.4 million.
The Plurinational State of Bolivia Emerges
In 2006, Bolivia embarked upon a new path, with an emphasis on social benefits reminiscent of revolutions past, from the Soviet Union to Nicaragua to Grenada.
The plurinational leadership, representing 36 different Indigenous languages, fought against a legacy of white supremacy, which many experienced as “apartheid without pass laws” (30). (Pass laws were used in South Africa to police Africans, forcing them to carry identification at all times.) In Bolivia, they established the Ministry of Institutional Transparency and Fight Against Corruption to uproot corrupt interests and clientelism sabotaging government attempts at reform (33). Social movements were now part of the people’s government. Part II of the book, titled “Fourteen Years of the MAS,” charts these enormous social gains that made it clear to the world that the decolonization of every facet of society, from the educational system to the media, was possible (71). MAS stands for Movimiento al Socialismo, or Movement Toward Socialism.
At the helm of this long overdue social transformation was coca farmer, trade unionist and veteran of the Cochabamba Water War and Gas Conflict, Juan Evo Morales Ayma. Morales emerged as the inspiring local and international representative of the Aymara, Quechua, Uru, and other Indigenous nationalities and working-class mestizos long marginalized in Bolivian politics and the economy. Every September at the United Nations General Assembly, Morales—as Bolivia’s president—articulated a defense of Pachamama, the Andean Earth Mother, spearheading a trailblazing, international environmental movement from the bottom. At the same time, MAS leadership, particularly Morales, was present in Managua, Havana and Caracas, forging an internationalist, Bolivarian unity project.
It was clear to all anti-imperialist observers that Bolivia and the global hegemon to the north—the United States—were on a collision course. In 2008, MAS leadership ordered U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg to leave the country after they found out USAID had used its Office of Transition Initiatives to give $4.5 million to the pro-secessionist Santa Cruz departmental government. The Bolivians then expelled the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency from their country.
Supporters of profound social change inside and outside of Bolivia wondered: How long before imperialism and their local agents seek to decapitate this vital leadership and halt the progressive social changes under way?
‘Black November’
Like all U.S.-backed coups in South America and the world over, this one was based on violence and intimidation.
Cover of Coup, by Linda Farthing and Thomas Becker (2021)
Farthing and Becker document the mobilization of fascist groupings based out of the European enclave of Santa Cruz, as well as police raids targeting MAS leaders and the destruction of the wiphala and other Indigenous symbols. Lighter-skinned European descendants and mestizos screamed “F*ck Pachamama,” blamed the MAS for the corruption that existed in the country, and forced Morales and other leaders to go into hiding and exile (141).
Once in office, Añez and her cabinet picks worked to undo 13 years of social gains. They retired their embassies from progressive countries, kicked out 725 Cuban doctors, and re-established relations with the United States and Israel (166).
In November 2019, 35 people were murdered for standing up to the coup (155).
The class-conscious researchers dedicate chapter 5 to documenting the extreme, racist repression to which millions of Bolivians were subjected. Through interviews with massacre survivors, the authors reconstruct how soldiers shot into crowds that had marched outside of the city of Cochabamba, turning another city called Sacaba into a “war zone” (147). “At the end of the day, Añez’s fourth in office, state forces had killed at least 10 and injured over 120 protesters and bystanders. All casualties were Indigenous, not a single police officer or soldier was harmed” (149).
When Lucho Arce took power as president in 2021, he recognized the blood that was shed to restore MAS to power, “asking for a moment of silence for those killed in Senkata, El Alto; Sacaba, Cochabamba; Montero, Santo Cruz, Betanzo, Potosi, Zona Sur La Paz; Pedregal, La Paz” (194).
Resuming the Path of Revolution
On November 9, Morales returned to his homeland. Millions came out into the streets, converging on Chapare, a MAS base, to see their humble leader, who never stopped standing up to the U.S. empire and their local agents. Admiring families brought him his favorite meal, chuño (freeze-dried potatoes) and charque (dehydrated meat), expressing how Morales “has made us proud to be Indigenous” and “we wouldn’t be here without Evo” (203).
Arce was the economic minister under Morales. He represents the ongoing defense and promotion of the class interests of the poor. Arce’s government presented this month an economic reconstruction program dedicated to building additional housing projects for the underprivileged, infusing $2.6 billion into the economy to satisfy mass consumer demands, opening up lines of credit, placing taxes on personal fortunes above $4.3 million, and increasing subsidies and pension plans (200).
Farthing and Becker present a balanced view of the Bolivian experience anti-imperialists everywhere can learn from. They don’t hesitate to dive into MAS’s challenges, excesses and mistakes. They contextualize the errors within centuries of Spanish colonial bureaucracy and underdevelopment. Potosi historian Camilo Katari also examines this wicked inheritance and how it continues to plague the Bolivian state today. Revolutions, now in the driver’s seat of history, don’t just attract the best of us. Careerists, opportunists, and other neocolonial bitter-enders jostle within local and national bureaucracies to secure their own sinecures and petty interests.
The Bolivarian Camp Pushes Forward
Bolivia occupies a unique space in the U.S. left’s imagination. Sometimes it may seem like they are spared some of the harshest neoliberal critiques. The truth is CNN en español and other corporate outlets continue to function as mouthpieces for the Añez camp and vilify Bolivia’s process. The full slate of corporate media outlets and leftist-liberal outlets go after MAS arguably as hard as they go after Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.
Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela—the anchors of the Bolivarian camp—have been spearheading the multi-centered global process. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro recently finished high-level meetings with Nicaraguan and South African leadership to continue building unity against the United States’ hegemony. These maroon states—those in which a large percentage of the population is of African descent—represent a permanent threat to the unipolarity U.S. transnationals are hellbent on imposing around the globe.
Coup is an important contribution, lest we forget where we need to stand and fight at this historical moment as neoliberalism and unipolarity are on the wane and a multipolar world surges forward from below.
Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels within the Americas region. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.
Farmers protest in India on December 26, 2020 / credit: Ravan Khosa
Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis.
November is a month of pleasant weather and festivities in India. But during the final week of this month last year, several hundred thousand farmers gathered on the borders of the National Capital Territory of Delhi—which contains the capital of New Delhi—to confront a huge police force.
They settled down at several points on the border, creating new townships and organizing huge langars, a Sikh concept that involves free meals cooked and eaten together as a community.
This protest sparked a general strike of 250 million Indian farmers as well as workers from other sectors, making it the largest known strike in the world.
Over 11 months have passed since then and farmers have maintained their protest sites, although at a smaller level, using this to inspire protests in other areas of India. The movement is the strongest in parts of northern India (states such as Punjab and Haryana, and the western portion of the state of Uttar Pradesh). But it has spread to other areas as well, thereby strengthening the overall opposition to India’s right-wing, sectarian ruling regime. While this movement has raised several demands, the most persistent one has been for the repeal of three highly controversial farm laws, which were passed in 2020, bypassing normal parliamentary procedures.
Women have made up a significant portion of the farmers’ protests in India over the past 11 months / credit: JK Photography
The farmers say—and several experts back these claims—that these new farm laws greatly increase the possibility of corporate control over the Indian farming and food system. One law strengthens the contract farming system in favor of corporate interests and against farmers. The second law increases possibilities for big corporations to hoard huge quantities of important crops and hence manipulate and dominate their market. The third law weakens the existing procurement farming system while facilitating a new, unregulated tax-free purchase system, which big business can easily dominate. Both local crony capitalists and big multinational agribusiness companies are likely to use these new opportunities to increase their domination, while also entering into collaboration to corner small farmers.
Allowing big business to dominate India’s food and farm system would be a culmination of trends witnessed in recent decades. The advent of Green Revolution seeds promoted by Western—particularly U.S.—pressure opened up Indian farming to big business, but led to an increase in pollution and soil degradation caused by chemical fertilizers and pesticides, escalated costs to farmers, lowered food quality, and the loss of biodiversity as local seeds and mixed farming systems were uprooted. Objections voiced by the most senior farm scientist, Dr. R.H. Richharia, director of the Central Rice Research Institute, were brushed aside with a heavy hand and he was rudely removed from his job.
The next stage of corporate domination came with the ushering in of the World Trade Organization regime, with its rules for international trade and patents. This could not be stopped, but resistance efforts helped save some safeguards for farmers.
The third stage came with the advent of genetically modified (GMO) crops, including the Bt Cotton crop. Next, efforts were taken to introduce GMO technology to grow several food crops, starting with brinjal (eggplant or aubergine) and mustard. A Monsanto partner mounted an aggressive campaign for spreading GMO brinjal, which would have paved the way for GMO technology to produce other food crops. However, a strong resistance movement opposed this and, so far, GMO food crops have been resisted more or less successfully. Professor Pushpa Bhargava, an acclaimed scientist to whom the Indian Supreme Court offered a special advisory role on this issue, warned, “The ultimate aim of this attempt of which the leader is Monsanto, is to obtain control over Indian agriculture and thus food production.”
Women harvesting rice in Palacode in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu / credit: Deepak kumar on Unsplash
The longer term trend has been for big agribusiness to try to dominate the Indian farming scene, although this has been resisted with varying success by farmers and activists at different stages. Building on this previous strength, many farmer organizations have shown greater unity and resilience this time for a more determined resistance.
This growing resistance may be one reason why the open announcement of the India-United States free trade agreement (FTA) has been postponed. Earlier prolonged negotiations for India’s proposed FTA with the European Union had to be called off due to strong objections raised by farmers, particularly dairy farmers.
Such fears are even more pronounced in the context of negotiations for FTA with the United States, which have been even less transparent than the European negotiations.
Sections of Indian bourgeois media have been speculating the FTA with the United States will be introduced in stages. Meanwhile, farmers’ concerns have been confirmed by other recent government decisions as well. Recent moves for mandatory protection of staple foods have been opposed in favor of facilitating the growing big-business domination of food processing and a setback to existing systems, which protect farmers and small processors from the pressures of a less regulated market. The Indian government also recently advocated for palm fruit trees to increase edible oil production, which has been criticized for harming the interests of millions of traditional oilseed farmers and disrupting the biodiversity and ecology of areas where palm-oil plantations are planning to be introduced on a mass scale.
Nearly two-thirds of India’s 1.38 billion people remain linked to rural livelihoods. Approximately 115 million farmer households can be counted in India, most of them small family farms. The growing big-business intrusion has led to an ever-escalating rise in farming costs and debt, in turn leading to ordinary farmers losing their land. According to census data, farmers have been turning into landless households at the rate of 100 per hour. From a global perspective, this is part of the worldwide struggle to save small farmer communities. The movement can gain traction if protesting farmers include the concerns of landless rural households, who now comprise almost half of households in the Indian countryside. Another widely felt need is for this movement to move toward ecologically protective farming, the importance of which has increased as the global climate changes.
Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener of the Campaign to Save Earth Now. He has been involved with several social movements in India. Dogra’s most recent books include Man Over Machine and Planet in Peril.
Hundreds of activists took to the streets on March 4, uplifting the anti-imperialist women’s movement / credit: Hannah Ballesteros
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Hundreds of mostly women gathered at Catholic University’s Maloney Hall during the first weekend of March to convene the first U.S.-based conference of a worldwide grassroots women’s network called the International Women’s Alliance, as well as help strengthen its fledgling U.S. chapter.
The conference kicked off early Saturday morning with speeches by Washington, D.C., “situationers,” Jacqueline Luqman and Madhvi Bahl.
Luqman, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace as well as IWA member organization Pan-African Community Action, gave an overview of how the U.S. government has oppressed Africans, starting from the late 1800s, when former slaves migrated from the U.S. South to Washington, D.C.. The U.S. Congress must approve all legislation passed by the district council and it controls the district’s budget. The U.S. President appoints the district’s judges, while it has no voting representation in Congress.
“It is because we are still a majority Black city, just barely. Forty percent Black with a 30 percent white population that is growing rapidly, due to continued rapacious gentrification,” Luqman told the crowd, which responded throughout her 18-minute presentation with hoots, hollers and applause. Luqman, also Toward Freedom‘s Board Secretary, left the mic to a standing ovation. Her talk can be found 28 minutes into this livestream playback.
Meanwhile, Bahl of the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network described how migrants’ human rights are being violated as they are used in a political tug of war.
Filipino activists shared about the experience of Filipina women in the U.S. and abroad, underscoring the importance of internationalism / credit: Hannah Ballesteros
IWA Chairperson Azra Talat Sayeed represents Roots of Equity, a Pakistan-based group that organizes peasants, women and religious minorities in Pakistan. She described the poverty in her country, which she connected to U.S. interference. In Pakistan, 44 percent of children under the age of five are experiencing stunted growth due to lack of food.
“My country is bleeding,” Sayeed said. “It’s a massacre.”
Later, Monisha Rios, a U.S. military veteran and psychologist who lives in Puerto Rico, described the impact of U.S. militarization on women around the world and the effect of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico.
Then a panel discussion featured women on the front lines of the working-class movement in the United States.
Edith Saldano of Starbucks Workers United spoke of workplace harassment that led to her radicalization. “Y’all are going to cry with me today,” the Santa Cruz, California-based worker said as her face grew red. She said it is normal for customers to physically attack workers. Saldano described one incident where someone threw a banana at a barista.
The Starbucks worker identified three issues that threaten employed women: Harassment, unstable working conditions (including schedules) and workplace injuries.
“It’s consistently putting working women in survival mode.”
Saldano said already about 100 workers who have been organizing unions in Starbucks coffee shops have been fired and subsequently blacklisted from working at other company stores.
“How do we give the working class a solution?” Saldano asked.
The panel discussion also featured Christina Brown, the sister of 39-year-old Poushawn Brown, a Virginia-based Amazon employee who had no medical training, but was switched to a role that involved testing workers for COVID-19 on a daily basis. However, Christina said her sister was not provided with the proper protective gear nor with hazard pay. A few months after she began testing workers, Poushawn returned home on January 7, 2021, not feeling well. The shock came the next morning.
“She did not wake up,” Christina told conference attendees.
Now, Christina raises her sister’s 14-year-old daughter and is engaged in a legal battle with Amazon.
“I’m up against a trillion-dollar company all by myself. It’s just me doing it. I can’t stop.”
Panel moderator Monica Moorehead, who helped found the IWA, remarked on the recent U.S. federal government’s move to eliminate the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food to poor households. The majority of recipients are people of color.
“This is a slow genocide,” Moorehead remarked.
Katie Comfort of International Women’s Alliance spoke on March 4 in front of the White House, calling on organizations to join IWA and the anti-imperialist women’s movement / credit: Hannah Ballesteros
The International Women’s Alliance also introduced a proposed campaign, “Meet Women’s Needs; Stop Corporate Greed!” This campaign is designed to address the failings of the U.S. government to meet the needs of women and their families, and demand change. This comes in addition to previously launched ongoing campaigns, “War and Militarism” and “Women Over Profit.”
The alliance kicked off in 2010 in Montreal in response to the International League of People’s Struggle’s 2008 call for a women’s conference to be held. 2010 was the centennial year International Toiling Women’s Day.
Demands to meet women’s needs over corporate profit were amplified throughout the March 4 mobilization / credit: Hannah Ballesteros
Later on during the first day of the conference, hundreds of women and their supporters started rallying at the Philippine embassy in Washington, D.C.
There, Vivian Flanagan from Terrapin Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (TerpCHRP) at the University of Maryland College Park, spoke to the impacts of war on women. They focused on one weapons manufacturer found on their campus, Lockheed Martin, and shared how its former executive vice-president, Linda Gooden, is on the Board of Regents that oversees all of Maryland’s public universities.
“Let Linda’s ‘professional success’ at the expense of trafficked, exploited and martyred women affected by Lockheed Martin’s war machine be a reminder of the treachery of liberal feminism,” she said.
After marching to the World Bank, organizations from Palestinian Youth Movement, Katarungan DC, CODEPINK, and spoke about the World Bank’s role in suppressing poor countries through foreign aid that perpetuates indebtedness. Raymond Diaz from Katarungan DC shared about their parents’ migration experience.
“Much like many children of poor immigrants, my Mexican parents left everything they knew when NAFTA came in, driving thousands of laborers out of their homeland and becoming a part of the working class in this country.”
When the march arrived at the White House, speakers from United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), Committee in Solidarity of the People of El Salvador (CISPES), Anti-Imperialist Action at University of Maryland Baltimore County, International League of Peoples Struggles (ILPS), African National Women’s Organization, Resist U.S. Led War, and IWA emphasized the call for international solidarity.
At the White House, Katie Comfort of IWA called for the unity of women and urged for the need to organize.
“Women are uniting around the world against U.S. imperialism and [women in the] the U.S. [have] to be a part of that movement. The International Women’s Alliance takes seriously the call to build IWA Americas not just here in the U.S., but in the Caribbean, in Latin America, to unite women around the world, to understand our common enemy is the U.S., the U.S. state, the U.S. military, who kills and rapes our women. So, we are here today to say the movement has to start now. We are not just here this weekend to speak out about it one time, but to keep speaking out about it until this House belongs to the People. We are here to declare Women over Profit.”
