Obama’s Lame Ass Response to Marijuana Legalization

Barack Obama is lame.  Honestly, dude is too smooth for himself.  The awful choreographed “Internet Town Hall” meeting finally brought up the serious question of ending the prohibition on marijuana.  Obama made sure the question was raised so he could dismiss it.  The fact that he has to dismiss it is some measure of how serious the question really has become.

Many hundreds of thousands of lives are ruined by the drug war in this country.  Over 800,000 people were arrested on marijuana charges last year, the vast majority for possession.  That means no student loans, no food stamps, no housing assistance, no public housing, etc. not to mention the legal and financial penalties as well as the real time people are doing. The so-called Drug War funnels billions of public dollars in a totally vain criminalization policy aimed at the poor, immigrants and black people.  The criminalization of drugs is the chief cause of drug violence.  This is a serious question.

Obama  uber-coolly made a point to let this generation know that he smoked weed.  Everyone smokes weed.  There is nothing counter-cultural about it any more.  It’s mainstream.  Now that the first warm days of spring have arrived my neighborhood smells like the Monterey Pop Festival.  And my neighborhood is better for it.

Obama’s  flip response to the question is a slap in the face of everyone going through the system for doing what he did.  Should he have been arrested?  Should he have gone to jail?  Should his buddy who packed the bowl?

But more importantly than his hypocrisy his position on the War on Drugs is telling.  If there ever was a failed strategy; and every single piece of data will prove the failure of the criminalization of drugs to stop drug use or production, than the War on Drugs is one.

Given the reason that people do drugs for reasons that have nothing to do with their legal status.   Given that it has overwhelmingly targeted black people, poor people and the most vulnerable in our society, given that it is a monumental waste of resources and creates the crime it states its aim is to prevent.  Given the harm done to individuals, families and communities whose members languish in jail for possession or don’t get treatment for real problems because of the stigma of illegality.  Given all that, how would any logical, let alone “progressive”, person respond to such a failed strategy (it makes Iraq seem small by comparison)?  With a flip dismissal of change, of course.  Just like the “change” brought by his financial team, it’s only more of the same.

Readers of this blog don’t need to be told the benefits of ending the War on Drugs.  I am for the legalization of all drugs.  This is a public health issue at most.  I am also for people to do what they will with their own bodies.  If that means a two month peyote binge, who I am to say no?  Of course some drugs are wicked, evil shit.  Booze has destroyed lots of lives.  Far, far more than smoking weed has.  It has also been a central feature in a thousand million beautiful moments in the lives of others.

I saw Obama in another uber-cool photo-op at a Bulls game sipping a tall cold one.  There was a time when that was illegal too.  No one would suggest banning it any more.  Not after the insanity of  false morality, crime, bureaucracy and waste of 1930′s prohibition, surely?  And, I for one, would much rather have my neighborhood smelling the sweet summer smell of Monterey rather than the sweaty beer-soaked odor of Altamont.

Activists in the decriminalization movement are rightly pissed at Obama’s indifference and hypocrisy.   Beyond that movement other things are happening.  There is respectable money now apart of the  many billions of dollar marijuana industry and they are one part of the economy that is not tanking right now.  The calls for decriminalization are coming from many corners.  Conservatives and libertarians are also raising it.  Especially as budget cuts make the bloated prison industrial complex with associated law enforcement agencies at risk of target.

A Zogby poll just released says a majority of people in the West now support legalization.   Other parts of the country are well above 40%.  California and Massachusetts are both to vote soon on bills decriminalizing and regulating marijuana.  Not decriminalisation, not “medical marijuana”, but legalization.   Now is the time to strike on this issue.  We need folks in the street saying the War on Drugs must end. If we win with marijuana it will be so much easier to argue against the rest of the War on Drugs.

Heads are another constituency Obama has disappointed and we are only months in!  Here’s a funny video put up by some irate heads.  Clearly, Obama has chosen to not respond to appeals on the question.  We need action.

You Aint Goin’ Nowhere

Sometimes something is so cool it just has to be posted….

George Galloway in Ann Arbor

Students Allied For Freedom & Equality Presents
British Parliamentarian
George Galloway

Speaking On The Tragedy of Gaza

“What is Happening in Palestine is murder on a mass scale,
perpetrated by one of the most powerful states in the world
with the backing of the US, Britain and its allies…”

When: THURSDAY, March 26th at 8pm
Where: Rackham Amphitheatre

University of Michigan Ann Arbor

This is a Stick Up!

Are you feeling dispossessed?  I know I am.  We often think that capitalism’s “primitive accumulation” ended with the Highland Clearances.  Far from it.  Capitalism has always gained by others’ loss.  That’s the way it works and today is no different. Such dispossession, such accumulation is at the very heart of capitalism’s modus operandi.  There wouldn’t be a United States without the continental theft and the theft of a continent’s labor.  And we aren’t alone.

In the previous decade, those booming 90′s, growth was built in large part on “accumulation by dispossession”.  Whether the dispossessed were the state economies of the East or the rights and gains of workers  “guaranteed” in the West by Social Democracy.  The privatization craze of the 80′s and 90′s as well as this decade is just such a dispossession.

It takes many forms; it is legal and it is illegal.  It is violent and it is done with a smile.  It is done by legistlature far more often than by army.  Though force is often the only tool available and the ruling class is not hesitant to avail themselves of it.  After all, free people do not willingly submit to being robbed. Alas, we are slaves.  But a slave that knows they are a slave ceases to be a slave in the same way and takes the first, giant, step to freedom.

And they don’t just dispossess the poorest and the weakest; the peasant and the wage slave.  On occasion they have sought to dispossess their strongest rivals.  Bad things happen when this goes on.  While the Cold War might have put a damper, out of class necessity, on the competition and conflict between imperial powers the “natural” state of affairs is the kind of bloody conflict of the first half of the previous century.  (How quickly the ruling classes ran to their own national institutions and banks once the crisis came upon them!)  This crisis may very well usher in new blocs of powers and fiercer competition among them.

This is especially true if US capitalism comes out of the crisis noticeably damaged.  There are emerging powers, there are contenders to the throne.  There is waiting in the wings.  There are competing (and entwined) interests between nations and national blocs whose very entanglement may well heighten competition in other areas adding even more instability to the situation.  O’Casey’s “chasis” may not be upon us, but who would say with a straight face that we, that capitalism, has moved so far forward that a repeat of the horrors of the previous century be impossible?  Not I.

Today other dispossessions are taking place.  Home after home thought to be “owned” by workers, in the millions now, are being taken back by the banks, by the capitalists.  And not just in this country, but in many of the wealthiest countries workers are finding themselves, once again, propertyless.  And only with property, with capital, comes political power.  This is especially true when our real social power, our labor, remains not our own and yet our own.  The less we flex our power, the less powerful we are.  Alienation the devil be.

Marxist economist David Harvey is fond of saying that if neo-liberalism meant, in the end, a consolidation of class power by the capitalists then in no way does this crisis signify the end of neo-liberalism, for class power and capital are being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands by way of the crisis.  How many big banks existed in the US just a year ago?  And today?

Here Harvey briefly talks a little about accumulation by dispossession; its history, its current reality and what it might mean for the class struggle.

Recession Notes: Not Another Highway

There certainly is a kerfuffle over the AIG bonuses.  While I am certainly happy to see the execs take a public dressing down, isn’t it a bit disingenuous for those who voted to bail out these folks without much in the way of conditions now tsking tsking where some of the money landed?  165 million is a helluva lot of bread for working people like me and you, but didn’t they just throw BILLIONS at these guys?   The bailout itself is the real scandal.

There is no justice in capitalist America.  The auto unions take it on the chin (but hey, they’ve gotten used to that)  and get told that their contracts have to go and yet AIG’s are inviolable.  The news reports today that Flint, Michigan, once a citadel of the UAW where now 30 percent of the buildings stand vacant, has to figure out a way to “contract the city” as the infrastructure is now unwieldy and in disrepair.   When whole parts of Michigan cities are now, quite literally, ghost towns talking in terms like “recession” just doesn’t convey the scope of the reality.

One of my current favorite homework-procrastination-time-killers these days is to peruse the classifieds for sweet wooded spots in the Upper Penninsula. Northern Michigan, where those well paid auto workers had summer homes and the rich still do, is in even worse shape.  Counties like Presque Isle have unemployment near or above 20 percent.  If you had a couple of thousand dollars, which no one I know does, now would be the time to get those few dream acres nestled on stream abutting the National Forest.  All of the hunting camps are going for peanuts as the once propertied skilled working class tries to sell their assets to pay their debts or to make that move.

On the bright side I haven’t seen a new subdivision go up in quite some time.  Whole subdivisions now stand empty or half-finished as a consequence of the housing boom then bust and the out-migration of labor. With names like  “Tuscan Hills” and “Prairie Village”  these monstrosities are a creeping plague on the landscape and the sooner we end the suburb, exurb, outurb cancer the better.  The problem in Michigan is that the urban core is hollowed out.  Detroit is only the most glaring, largest example.

It seems to me that the first step in refashioning these cities is to create real public transportation to serve and cohere the remaining communities.  In deed, a massive public transportation program seems like just about the best thing we might expect from the government at this moment.  It addresses numerous crises: energy and environmental, class and access, cost and efficiency, sprawl and urban renewal, etc.  Nope, we get highways.

Lots and lots of highways, built for individual and commercial transportation to act as the publicly built and maintained transportation infrastructure for private business.   The highway: built by Eisenhower as a Cold War missile and military transit system and since instigator of the suburb and the Hummer.  We need less highways, not more.  Big thinking must come in small sizes with the “progressives” in Washington these days.

Sinn Fein’s Michael Collins Moment

John McAnulty of Ireland’s Socialist Democracy interjects some sanity into the discussion of recent events in the north of Ireland.

Sinn Fein’s Michael Collins Moment

There has been a united response by all the Irish and British political parties to the killing of British soldiers in Antrim and the later killing of a policeman in Craigavon. They all say that:

* Republican militarists have nothing to offer.
* The militarists have no support
* The political process in the North of Ireland is secure.

Only one of these assertions is true.

It is true that the militarists offer absolutely no way forward for Irish workers. It is not true to assert that they have no support nor that the political process is secure. In fact, it is precisely because the political settlement is failing that the militarists are gaining in support.

It is highly unlikely that any outside the most frantic of Sinn Fein supporters believed that that the end result of the peace process would be a united Ireland. What they all believed was that that the Northern statelet could be reformed to become a more equal society.

Right from the beginning that proved too much. Democratic rights were mutated by the Good Friday Agreement into supposedly equal sectarian and communal rights. It was a settlement that didn’t give enough to Britain’s Unionist base and it was tweaked towards Unionist majority rule in the St. Andrews agreement.

During St. Andrews the DUP agreed to devolve policing and justice and Sinn Fein were promised sops around a centre recording the hunger strike and a unified sport stadium and an Irish language act.

It proved impossible to get the DUP administration to honour these promises and a Sinn Fein work to rule blocking the functioning of the executive failed. The British gave them substantial backhanders to compensate them. More recently, alongside the decision to block any full investigation of state terror came an offer of £12 000 to the relatives of those killed. Unionist outcry led to the withdrawal of the offer. Even the backhanders have dried up.

On the economic front the shootings led the Sinn Fein and DUP leaders to cancel an investment tour of the USA – one of many such trips, all failures, serving to underline the absence of any real economic strategy for the North of Ireland.

This has not led to a mass nationalist rejection of the Northern settlement. The Irish capitalists will support any imperialist plan. The power of the Catholic Church has greatly increased under the sectarian setup. The middle class wallow in sectarian privilege marked by ‘equality’ positions in public service earmarked for one confessional group or the other. Sinn Fein itself has a backbone of ‘community workers’ paid by the state.

A minority of republicans have rejected Sinn Fein and the partitionist settlement, aiming to revive a military campaign against British rule. They have been completely ineffective because of the demoralisation caused by decades of militarism and state repression, because of their fragmented and divided movement and because of the absence of support. Above all, the total absence of any political program has fatally handicapped them.

They are still not large, but they have now seen the exodus of the last of the militarists holding on in the Provos. More generally there is a growing revulsion at the aroma of corruption around Sinn Fein. A growing number of working class youth are unable to see the new world that the Shinners promised. . The result of that growth is that state intelligence has degraded. They still know the old hands, but have only partial penetration of the new cells. There is also the growth of a new infrastructure of supporters willing to provide money, intelligence, safe houses and weapons dumps.
For all that their opponents are right when they say that republican militarism offers no way forward. In the tradition of pure physical force republicanism, RIRA boast that they have no political organisation.

Without a thought they include pizza delivery men as targets, apparently unaware of the extent to which the policy of the ‘soft target’ demoralised their own supporters and besmirched the name of republicanism in the past.

They have no explanation, other than betrayal, for the abysmal failure of decades of military struggle and the relatively easy absorption of their compatriots into the structure of colonial rule. Above all they seem completely unaware that the southern capitalists are the most frantic supporters of the settlement and the chief mechanism through which the political dissolution of the Provos was obtained.

Yet within the narrow grounds of the physical force tradition, the republicans have a clear strategy. Their military capacity represents nothing in relation to British military might, but they believe that even a low level of activity will be enough to bring down the new Stormont regime.

A major target is Sinn Fein. The republicans calculate that the pressures of their campaign will collapse the organisation and win supporters to the RIRA. They also calculate that it will act as a recruiting sergeant, bringing disaffected nationalist youth into their ranks.

Politically their belief that armed action can bring down the northern statelet makes little sense. It is true that the Good Friday Agreement has been decaying since its inception, but it has been decaying to the right, into a more naked and reactionary expression of imperialist interest, driven by increasing unionist reaction and republican capitulation. Militarism can only play a traditional role of stirring up and accelerating the political process – in this case speeding up a drive to the right.

A sign of that drive to the right came quickly, with what one reporter called ‘Martin McGuinness’ ‘Michael Collins moment’. (Collins was a leading figure in the Irish war of Independence who then led the Free State repression of the republicans). McGuinness called the republicans ‘traitors to the island of Ireland’. He called on his supporters to inform on them and to support state repression.He claimed that the new dispensation guaranteed political progress, despite being unable to show any such progress other than the presence of themselves and their supporters within the state apparatus.

Such was the determination of Sinn Fein to prove their worth that they did not stop with assurances to the British and DUP. A special meeting with representatives of the loyalist paramilitaries brought them in on the act. Apparently the fact that they retain a full arsenal of weapons aimed at Catholic workers is no longer a cause for censure.

Sinn Fein have little choice. They themselves are targets of the republicans. Any suggestion that the good Friday process failed would lead to the collapse of their organisation. They must support instant state repression in the hope that it quickly defeats the militarists. In any case any hesitation on their part might well lead to their expulsion from the administration. British Tory leader David Cameron has already indicated that he wants to replace the current forced coalition of Sinn Fein and DUP with a ‘voluntary coalition’ – in other words, unionist majority rule.

So already we have a step-change to the right. The Irish peace process has left behind any pretence that jaw-jaw will be enough to sustain it. There is to be war-war in the form of state repression. This new dispensation will be spearheaded by Sinn Fein and will enjoy widespread public support.

In the short term the militarists have strengthened the imperialist settlement. In the long run there are still many contradictions. Sinn Fein will be isolated from significant sections of the nationalist working class and will continue to decay. The state will want to target the repression so that the republicans are isolated, but this will be difficult to do given the intelligence deficit. The DUP leadership has welcomed the Provos role in spearheading the reaction, but that does not mean they will reward them by supporting any reform. At the grassroots the reaction of many members of the DUP to the attacks will be to look for Sinn Fein’s expulsion from the administration.

The Irish peace process will continue its march to the right. A military campaign offers no solution, but then neither does the position of their opponents, which offers frantic support to the British and denounces any political criticism of the settlement as a form of terrorism.
Trade union demonstrations on the days following the deaths illustrated this perfectly. They went well beyond protests about the shooting of the two workers or more general protests about militarism to hysterical calls by TU leader Peter Bunting for unconditional support for the sectarian status quo. In an even more extreme development Patricia McKeown of unison claimed that the trade unions would act as ‘civic society’ in coordination with the state to make the repression successful. The widespread hysteria from all sides is not aimed at the relative handful of militarists. The disquiet about the corrupt society that has been brought into existence is much wider and a consistent theme of the supporters of the current settlement has been to demonise the opposition and attempt to convince workers that the only alternative to supporting the status quo is a sectarian bloodbath. It is this unconditional support for an imperialist settlement, rather than a criticism of militarism that makes this Sinn Fein’s Michael Collins moment and makes the organisation an obstacle to the resolution of the Irish question.

The settlement in the North of Ireland is not a democratic settlement. It hardly pretends any longer to be one, depending on popular rejection of a failed militarism and on unconditional support for the state from the formerly anti-imperialist opposition. That’s not enough to prevent its eventual collapse. The former radicals bay their hatred of the militarists, but by blocking any political critique they are telling the disaffected and marginalised that only physical force remains as a response.
It is for socialists and democrats to prove the former radicals wrong and build a political opposition.

It’s Friday! It’s the Buzzcocks!

The Battle of the “Bloody Meatcoat”

My comrade Rhonda Laur, a full time Kroger meat department employee and a UFCW Local 876 Steward, wrote this piece about a five and a half year battle she and her coworkers waged for justice over “bloody meatcoats” at Kroger.

I was a member of local 876 for twelve years, much of it working like Rhonda in the meat department of a grocery store.  Laid off in a round of store closings (Michigan’s recession started way before the rest of the country’s) I have a ton of tales of similar violations of health and safety at every location I worked.  There is nothing, comrades, like waking up at six in the morning for years to grind meat in a cold, wet, blood and sinew splashed room. Worse, as they made me do when I had no seniority, was cleaning out the bone barrels in the alley behind work.  One can acclimate oneself to almost anything, but not the bone barrel.

I congratulate Rhonda on this dearly won victory after such an excruciatingly long struggle.  As Rhonda writes you only win if you fight.  Thanks for fighting this through to the end- an inspiration to all grocery workers.  Salute!

Michigan Workers Win “Bloody Meatcoat” Battle

On January 17, 2009, United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 876 announced a nearly $2.2 million settlement from the Kroger Co. for meat and seafood dept. employees working in southeast Michigan Kroger stores. The award ends a more than 5 year battle against a Kroger policy which forced its employees to launder soiled and bloody meatcoats in their own homes, on their own time and at their own expense.

The Bloody Battle Begins

The fight began in the fall of 2003, when Kroger cancelled its professional linen service contracts and announced its home laundering policy to meat and seafood workers. Meatcoats soiled with blood and raw juices from cows, pork, fish, chicken, lamb and veal would no longer be left at the store in laundry bags at the end of each shift.  Instead, employees had to take them in their cars, to their homes where infants, children, elderly adults and people with compromised immune systems might be living, and launder them in whatever facilities were available.

For the first 14 months of the policy, fulltime workers were given 3 meatcoats, part-time workers were given 1.

Part of a National Trend

The decision by the Kroger Co. to require home laundering for Michigan employees followed similar announcements in Kroger stores across the country. According to the Kroger Co., Michigan and Ohio were the last of their marketing areas to have professional linen services replaced by home laundering. To this date, UFCW Local 876 is the only local in the nation to have arbitrated the issue.

Workers Won’t Back Down

In January, 2004, Kroger sent a Human Resources representative to meet with Local 876 officials and a group of the most militant and outspoken meat and seafood workers. Workers explained their numerous health and safety concerns, emphasizing the minimal expense of professional laundering, offering to split the cost among employees for maintaining the linen service, asking Kroger to put washers and dryers in the stores-anything to avoid taking the soiled and bloody meatcoats out of the store and into their cars and homes to be laundered. Their pleas fell on deaf ears.

Fortunately, their anger and frustration was not lost on the Local 876 officials in the room. Having cut meat before moving into union positions, these officials knew what it was like to be drenched in blood and animal juices. They understood the imposition on workers and their families and the danger inherent in home laundering. The meeting ended with UFCW leaders pledging to fight Kroger’s bloody meatcoat policy as a class action grievance in arbitration.

MIOSHA & Ag. Dept. Back Kroger

Meat and seafood workers also turned to the Michigan Occupational Safety & Health Administration (MIOSHA) and the Dept. of Agriculture for support against the policy. The health and safety inspectors initially backed the employees and encouraged them to file complaints based on the 1999 Michigan Food Code which prohibited food establishments from conducting any part of their business in private homes.  Unfortunately, the leadership of these two groups decided that corporate business interests trump employee health and safety. After discussing the complaints with Kroger officials, they agreed to give grocery stores an exclusion from that provision of the Food Code.

Workers Win, Kroger Appeals

In March, 2006, after 2 ½ years of the bloody meatcoat policy, an independent arbitrator ruled that the Kroger Co. could require home laundering under its contract with UFCW Local 876 but that it must pay meat and seafood employees for their time and cleaning expenses.

Hoping to overturn the arbitrator’s ruling and get a court sanction for shifting their laundering costs onto workers, the Kroger Co. appealed the arbitration first in Federal District Court in Michigan and then to the U.S. 6^th Circuit Court of Appeals in Kroger’s hometown, Cincinnati, Ohio. They lost both appeals.

Kroger Reverses the Policy

For the 1,200 full and part-time employees forced to home launder bloody meatcoats for nearly 5 years while the arbitration was being argued, decided and appealed twice, the arbitrator’s ruling brought them more than financial compensation. In March, 2008, 3 months before the Circuit Court rejected Kroger’s second appeal, the company decided to limit its probable losses–it abandoned the home laundering policy and reestablished professional laundering services!

Workers Win Back Pay

On February 8, 2009, checks and giftcards from the nearly $2.2 million bloody meatcoat settlement were distributed to Kroger meat and seafood employees by UFCW Local 876 officials.  The entire amount was distributed among the membership with fulltime employees who home laundered the entire 5 year period receiving checks for $1700 in back pay and $271 Kroger gift cards for laundry soap.

Payments were prorated for employees with 4 years on down to employees who home laundered for 6 months. Part time employees received half of the full time amount based on their seniority. Retirees, former employees and even to the families of deceased former employees were also given their shares of the settlement.

An Exceptional Victory

In this era when victories for workers against their corporate employers are too few, the militant determination of Michigan meat and seafood workers to fight and the willingness of the UFCW Local 876 leadership to back them up led to victory and showed that unions, if they fight, can still win.

Rhonda Laur is a full time Kroger meat dept. employee and a UFCW Local 876 Steward.