AT THE END OF THIS HATED WAR, WE NEED TRUTH

The U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan should force a reckoning with a long history of military intervention.

By David Bacon
Foreign Policy in Focus | August 30, 2021
View at Foreign Policy in Focus


Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) was the main speaker at the rally of over 200,000 people who marched up Market Street in San Francisco to protest the Bush administration’s war on terror and threatened invasion of Iraq. (© 2001, David Bacon)
Many in the U.S. media continue to credit the good intentions of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while belaboring its failure over 20 years to achieve any of them. But to say that the United States wanted a progressive, liberal democratic, and secular government in Afghanistan can only be believed by those who refuse to remember what Washington did when Kabul actually had one.

In the days following the attacks on September 11, the United States was called on to declare war against an enemy those in Congress who voted for it couldn’t even name. Policymakers asked American citizens to sacrifice civil liberties for security and give the military money that was so desperately needed to solve the country’s social problems.

Congress did those things with only one dissenting vote: Barbara Lee’s. Now it’s time to look at historical truth, to understand how the United States got this 20-year war, with its ignominious end at the Kabul airport, and how the overarching framework of U.S. policy was responsible for creating it.

Other countries facing similar traumatic changes wrenching them from the past have pioneered a way to examine their own history. El Salvador, Guatemala, South Africa, and elsewhere established truth commissions to probe into and acknowledge each country’s real history. Such public acknowledgement is a necessary step towards change.

The United States is no stranger to this process. After the end of the Vietnam War (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it), Senator Frank Church held watershed hearings that brought some of the Cold War’s ghosts to public attention. But the process was cut short, the policies responsible for Cold War atrocities never fully questioned, and as a result, the ghosts were never laid to rest. Those ghosts still haunt the United States, and in Afghanistan hundreds of thousands died for them.

The massive social upheaval at home following the Vietnam War- and the deaths of over a million Vietnamese and 40,000 US soldiers-forced Senator Church’s examination. Before the people of this and other countries pay a similar price in yet another war, the United States need to reexamine that history.

The roots of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington lie in the Cold War. Without truly ending it and untangling its consequences, there will be no security for us.

Full Story at David Bacon’s Blog Site

JOB SECURITY – STILL ON THE TABLE FOR UC LECTURERS

By David Bacon
CFT United, 5/25/21
https://www.cft.org/article/job-security-still-table-uc-lecturers


All photos © David Bacon, from strikes by lecturers, clericals, technical workers and others at the University of California Berkeley campus, 2002 and 2003.

When lecturers at the University of California fought in 1984 to win recognition for their union and the right to bargain, their biggest issue was job security. The university had a barbaric rule – lecturers were automatically terminated at the end of three to eight years of teaching, depending on the department. If, indeed, they lasted that long. At UC Santa Cruz, lecturer Roz Spofford proudly told her colleagues, “Our local was the first to fight the ‘four year’ rule. With AFT support, we were able to save the jobs of lecturers statewide.”

These contingent faculty members voted for the union by an overwhelming majority in one of the first elections held under the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act. They then went into negotiations. It took two years to win agreement from the university on their first contract, and its signal achievement was ending the termination rule.


UC labor activist Margy Wilkinson, addressing rally of UC students, staff and lecturers.

Other contracts followed. After strikes on some campuses in 2002 and a three-year campaign, the union won continuing 3-year appointments for lecturers who complete six years of teaching and pass an exam, jokingly called by some “passing through the eye of the needle.” The university has to renew the appointments so long as classes are available the lecturer can teach.

Today, however, job security is still the most important issue for lecturers, especially for those still trying to reach the six-year goal. Only 7.8 percent of lecturers since 2003 have had continuing appointments. According to John Branstetter, president of the UC-AFT chapter at UCLA, it is difficult for lecturers to reach continuing status, because the closer they get to the six-year goal, the likelier it is they won’t be rehired.

The solution put forward by UC-AFT is a system to protect the job rights of lecturers as they continue teaching, especially their right to be rehired from one year to the next. But the unwillingness of the University of California administration to recognize job security as a key issue is preventing agreement on a new contract, although the old one expired over a year ago.

Full Story Here

HOUSING IS A RIGHT. DURING A PANDEMIC, IT’S ALSO A FIGHT.

By David Bacon
The Nation, January 12, 2021

POPLAR, CA – 10AUGUST20 – The Lacambacal family is a family of Filipino farmworkers who originally came from Paniqui, in the Tarlac province of the Philippines. They live in a home in Poplar that they built as part of the Self Help program. Lhiann with her grandparents Reginaldo and his wife Gloria, who came from the Philippines 20 years ago. During the coronavirus crisis Reginaldo wears a mask around his neck.
© 2020, David Bacon

In California’s agricultural heartland, farmworkers are fighting back against expensive rents, substandard housing, and economic disenfranchisement.

Support for this reporting came from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Poplar, Calif.-In the Covid era, poverty in California’s rural agricultural counties has become deadly. California now has over 2.7 million coronavirus cases. While Los Angeles, with its huge population, has the largest number of cases with over 920,000, the highest infection rates actually are to be found in less-populous counties with large farmworker populations. Imperial County, right across the border from Mexicali, Mexico, and Kings County, just south of Fresno, both have well over 10,000 cases per every 100,000 residents. California is the richest state in the United States, so it’s easy to forget that its rural poverty and substandard farmworker housing have contributed to the surge in Covid-19 cases here.

Tulare County, a large county in California’s southern San Joaquin Valley, was a tourist destination in better times-it’s home to the towering forests of the Sequoia National Park. But Tulare is also a working county-it was here that the United Farm Workers was born out of the 1965 grape strike, and it remains one of the most important agricultural regions in the state and the country. Tulare, with a population of about 466,000, has 34,479 Covid-19 cases, and 406 people have died. That gives it infection and death rates more than twice those of urban San Francisco or Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County.

POPLAR, CA – 13JULY20 – Erika carries her ladder from the row of trees she’s just finished picking, to the next row in Poplar. The ladder weighs about 30 pounds. Most women farmworkers normally wear some kind of face covering, usually a bandanna, while working in the fields. The bandanna protects against the sun and breathing dust, and even against sexual harassment. Since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis bandannas have become a protection against spreading Covid-19 as well.
© 2020 David Bacon

Covid rates follow income. Family annual income in San Francisco and Santa Clara is more than twice that of Tulare. Over 32,000 the county’s residents are farmworkers, and farmworker families survive on less than half of what most US families earn.

In Tulare, poverty forces people to live closer together to share rent and living costs, making social distancing difficult. People here go to work because they have no cushion of savings-a day without pay can be difficult; a week could be ruinous. Traveling to and from the fields in crowded cars or buses also places workers in close proximity. “Getting better housing has become a survival need at a time when existing conditions make the threat of the virus much much worse,” Mari Perez, an organizer with the Larry Itliong Resource Center in Poplar, a farmworker community in Tulare County, told me.

POPLAR, CA – 12JULY20 – Justin lives with his mother in an encampment on the Tule River levee near Porterville.
&copy: 2020 David Bacon

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