Dostoevsky, a prophet of today's spiritual malaise across the West

 (To the right, a portrait of Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov) (

 

It was 34 years ago in 1992 that I stood in the St. Petersburg apartment where Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky lived and wrote. In his writing room were his desk, his last pack of cigarettes, the couch on which he died. Outside a window in the apartment was a church.

 

“He insisted that he be able to look out the window and see a church,” our tour guide told us.

 

I’ve had Dostoevsky on my mind in recent weeks. My son, a lawyer in New Orleans, sent me a copy of the writer’s 1873 novel Demons, and I’m making my way through the 714-page tome. Actually I’m reading it a second time. The first, when its title was The Possessed, was when my late wife Marilyn and I went to Russia in 1992.

 

(Photos by Joseph B. Atkins of Dostoevsky's apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia)
 

 

Besides being one of the world’s greatest novelists, Dostoevsky was also something of a prophet. The entire theme of Demons—and implied theme of his other works—is the incipient spiritual downfall of modern mankind, particularly his beloved Russia.

 

As a former socialist who spent eight years in a Siberian prison for his youthful radicalism, Dostoevsky saw the invasion of all the “isms” from Europe as indeed demonic, foreshadowing of Russia’s own descent into materialism and atheism, what indeed became of Russia after the 1917 revolution and its subsequent 70 years of Communist rule as the Soviet Union.

 

“Idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and, underlying them all, atheism,” writes translator Richard Pevear in his foreword to Demons describing Dostoevsky’s world view. “The assertion of human autonomy is finally a revolt against God; it is also the final lie.”

 

Does  Dostoevsky has something to say to the modern West, where war and greed and materialism rule not only our headlines but our lives. Isn’t Europe today deeply compromised by a materialist neoliberal agenda that pushes immigration on its citizens so that its capitalist warlords can have cheap labor, that pushes coup d’etats and war in Ukraine and elsewhere to serve the American Empire rather than its own economic and social interests? Aren’t the European Union and NATO the very symbols of this?

 

I lived in Germany for four years in the 1970s and never saw one of its magnificent cathedrals actually crowded with worshipers. I never met a strongly religious European.

 

“The spirit of the continent’s religion … drove people to war and stirred them to defense,” writes Charles Murray in his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe. “It also drove Europeans to the greatest heights of human creativity. It drove Europeans to build St. Peter’s in Rome, the Cathedral at Chartres, the Duomo of Florence and the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. It inspired the works of Bach, Beethoven and Messiaen, Grünewald’s altarpiece at Isenheim and Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks.”

 

Certainly two world wars and a long Cold War left an exhausted, spiritually depleted Europe where even the philosophers had given up the search for truth in exchange for deconstructed word games. 

 

Today, in the face of massive numbers of Muslim immigrants, many of them highly religious, Europeans have little spiritually to offer in response.

 

In the United States, fundamentalist Christianity does wield at least a kind of superficial influence in the Trump Administration, but this version of the faith is grounded in a “ministry of success” that extols raw capitalism and ignores large chunks of Jesus’ teachings.

 

When I was in Russia, I remember walking past the Museum of Atheism in St. Petersburg. Much more impressive were the crowded Orthodox churches and monasteries, where priests and monks heard confessions and offered prayers that 70 years of official atheism couldn’t erase. Years later, I saw similarly crowded churches and cathedrals in Poland that gave testament to a faith forgotten or ignored farther to the west.

 

“God is good to us,” 20-year-old Arthur Smolyak told my wife and me in Russia in 1992. He was a seminarian from Moldavia studying in Zagorsk, an ancient center of the Orthodox faith 44 miles northeast of Moscow.  “It used to be easy to get in the seminary. Now it’s very hard because so many people want to get in.”

 

Dostoevsky didn’t allow his religious faith to blind him from the needs of the people. It only deepened his awareness of those needs. “I could never understand the notion that only one-tenth of people should attain higher development, and the remaining nine-tenths should only serve as a means and material to that goal while themselves remaining in darkness,” he wrote in Diary of a Writer in 1876.  

 

However, Dostoevsky saw that too many so-called saviors or champions of those nine-tenths are themselves so spiritually empty that they in their heart of hearts only “love money terribly … and value it to the extreme.” That is their god—money—and one could add power. In shedding a light onto this darkness, Dostoevsky stressed that ultimately man has the power to choose whether to allow the “demons” of the world to rule his life.

 

His hope was that man would make the right choice. His fear was that he would not.

Somehow Hollywood produced a pro-Castro film noir in 1959, something as unlikely in today's noirish landscape as it was then

  

For a while, I couldn’t believe what I was watching on television, a pro-Cuban Revolution, anti-Batista Hollywood film made shortly after the revolution and during the post-McCarthy-era’s continuing nationwide harassment of anything hinting at communism.

 

Pier 5, Havana, a 1959 thriller starring Cameron Mitchell and Allison Hayes, tells the story of the American Steve Daggett (Mitchell) coming to Cuba to find a missing friend and encountering a pro-Batista counterrevolutionary group that has kidnapped his friend to use him to convert airplanes into bombers. Steve finds himself helping to frustrate those efforts and support Fidel Castro’s new government.

 

It’s amazing such a film wasn’t verboten in an America still reeling from U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Commie witchhunt. In the immediate years ahead lay Castro’s conversion to communism, JFK’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 that threatened the nuclear destruction of the world.

 

Today, after decades of economic sanctions that have kept Cuba stuck in a kind of 1950s time warp, U.S. President Trump is threatening another Cuban invasion and takeover. Given his criminal bombing war against Iran, kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and his wife, and killing of boat crews off the coast of Venezuela, Trump’s threats need to be taken seriously.

 

What Pier 5, Havana reminded me, however, is the interesting role of film noir—Pier 5, Havana is considered a “neo-noir”—in exposing the dirty underside of American capitalism. Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s ties to Big Capital and the mafia in the United States were key to his hold on power. He was a handpicked puppet of the U.S. whose domestic support came from sugar plantation owners and the super wealthy in a country that, then as now, suffered from great poverty.

 

Robert Aldrich’s 1955 noir, Kiss Me Deadly, is a classic example. Leftwing screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides took the crypto-fascist plot of crime writer Mickey Spillane’s novel and turned it into a fierce cry against the threat of nuclear Armageddon. “This is lousy. Let me see what I can do with it,” Bezzerides told Aldrich after reading Spillane’s novel. Then later: “I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it.”

 

 

Noir is full of working class sympathies and righteous indignation against the abuses and exploitation by the 1 percent. The French identified film noir and named it, but it could only have taken root in American soil, where hyper individualism and its offshoots of greed and selfishness are championed. It’s as American as Apple pie and baseball.

 

Hardboiled writer Jim Thompson, whose books led to several great noirs, was a former Industrial Workers of the World/IWW Wobbly. Dashiell Hammett spent time in prison because of his radical political views and allegiances.

 

Noir grew out of the hardboiled school of writing in the 1920s and the gangland films of the 1930s. G.I. disillusionment after World War II helped set the stage for the dark films that followed. Those soldiers had fought fascism in Europe and Asia only to return to a nation held captive by the U.S. House for Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy.

 

Trump was an understudy of McCarthy crony Roy Cohn. In many ways, he’s a blast from a not-so-good past. Trump’s world provides dark and fertile soil for a new wave of noir, and I hate it as much as I love those old black-and-white movies.

 

Jesse Jackson in 1988: "I do intend to be a part of the conscience of the nation"

(Jesse Jackson in 2013)
  

I watched Jesse Jackson from a few rows behind him on the yellow school bus in Houston’s crime-and-poverty-ridden 3^rd District as someone in the rear shouted, “We’ve got the president on the bus!”

 

It was late fall 1988, and Jackson was no longer a presidential candidate. He was a campaigner for Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. Jackson would never be president, and he probably knew it after two unsuccessful runs to become the nation’s first black president.

 

“I will continue working, fighting for justice at home,” the 47-year-old minister and civil rights leader would say soon after that supporter shouted his school bus endorsement. “I will continue to study and grow.”

 

I was a reporter for Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C., at the time, and my assignment was to follow Jackson around the nation as he campaigned for Dukakis. For weeks, we traveled together—from the Texas-Mexico border to Wisconsin’s border with Canada. At each stop, he told the crowds—from domestic workers in Texas to the destitute poor in New Orleans’ Desire Housing Projects to farmers in Wisconsin—to “keep hope alive”, that they are “somebody”, that they need to keep reaching for “higher ground.”

 

Jackson, who died Feb. 17 at the age of 84, kept his promise. He did indeed spend the rest of his life studying and growing and certainly fighting for justice. He was a tireless supporter of black people, yes, but also of all people regardless of race. I remember well his familiar reminder to the huge media presence among his multi-racial audiences that they should consider the hard-working folks who rose early in the morning to come and clean their hotel rooms and make sure they had clean sheets.

 

“I always seek to establish a moral foundation to any speech,” he said to us later on the small plane that flew us to many stops. “There is no greater moral authority than the Bible. Jesus was a master teacher.”

 

In 1988, Jackson’s mission included keeping the national Democratic Party tied to its roots in the working class, and it put him at odds with members of the Democratic Leadership Council, a largely Southern organization led by the likes of Bill Clinton and U.S. Sen. John Breaux, D-La. The DLC wanted the party to shift to the center-right to blunt the hemorrhaging of white males to the Republican Party.

 

Jackson “fits in like a big thorn,” Atlanta-based political analyst Clairbourne Darden told me in 1988.

 

Jackson lost that fight as today’s Democratic Party is largely fixed in a Clintonian center-right mode with little real interest in the party that once put Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in the White House.

 

In his first bid for the presidency in 1984, Jackson received 3.3 million votes in the Democratic Party primaries. He more than doubled that in his 1988 bid with 6.9 million votes. He was never to win the big prize, but he did set the stage for Barack Obama to become the first black president a couple decades later.

 

Born in 1941 in a three-room house with no running water and an outhouse in the back in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson played football in college and gravitated quickly toward the burgeoning civil rights movement. He became a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was with Martin Luther King Jr. when King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968.

 

Jackson would go to make his Rainbow Coalition and Operation Push major forces for social justice (the organizations would later combine). His work reached beyond the United States and made him a voice heard and listened to across the world.

 

“I do intend to be a part of the conscience of the nation,” he told black graduate business students in Houston back in 1988.

 

He was right about that, and his success is one reason why he will be remembered long after his death.

 

 

Trump better hope his gambit in Venezuela doesn't turn into another Vietnam

 (To the right, the author in Vietnam in 1971)

I was an anti-war protester in college who ended up getting drafted and serving as a U.S. Army soldier in Vietnam. Burned out with protesting and not wanting to flee to Canada, I was a guy from a blue-collar family without a deferment, like so many of the soldiers who ended up in Vietnam.

 

As a former political activist, however, I couldn’t help from appreciating the irony in a poster I spotted on or near my base in Plantation, South Vietnam, a handful of miles north of Saigon. It was 1971, and Nguyen Van Thieu was running for re-election as president of the “Republic” of Vietnam. The poster encouraged voters to cast their ballots for a man who’d been in charge since 1965.

 

Only problem was he had no opposition. It was a one-man race. Thieu was the only choice South Vietnamese voters had.

 

The point today is that the United States had no problem sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers like me to fight for an authoritarian regime that was anything but a republic or a democracy. Thieu had been a turncoat supporter of the French colonialists before he became a puppet for the Americans.

 

This is important in light of the recent U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife on unproven claims that they are tyrannical drug lords. The U.S. government has no problem with dictators or even drug lords so long as they don’t interfere with the flow of U.S. capital or nationalize industries that once belonged to powerful U.S. corporations.

 

In fact, on December 1, Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, a convicted drug trafficker.

 

Like his predecessors, President Donald Trump, who campaigned as a “peace” candidate sick of endless wars such as those fought by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, has become enthralled in the chess game that is international politics. He has threatened another war against Iran and a takeover of Greenland, proposed building a money-making seaside resort in bombed-out Gaza in league with his ethnic cleanser friends in Israel, and rattled his sword at China and occasionally even Russia despite his amateurish efforts to end the war in Ukraine. He has ordered bombing in Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Syria.

 

Trump won re-election because voters thought he was going to save them from the “Bidenomics” that had failed to quell inflation or resolve the growing housing issue. A year into his new term he seems to have lost interest in domestic economic issues, and yet, like his predecessor Joe Biden, claims life is so much better in today’s America.

 

The housing crisis? Price of eggs and inflation in general? Health care? Who cares?

 

What’s different about Trump from his predecessors is that he doesn’t sugarcoat his imperialistic motives. He blatantly says he’ll “run” Venezuela in the wake of Maduro’s kidnapping. He claims Venezuelan oil reserves as U.S. oil reserves. He says Greenland should be under U.S. control regardless of Denmark’s claims or what that means to the basic premises or future of NATO’s existence. He lies about why he kidnapped Maduro but he doesn’t couch his motives in talk of “democracy” or “human rights” like so many previous U.S. leaders.

 

His disregard—actually contempt—of his allies in Europe and the rest of the Western world is on full display. As seen in Trump’s year-long struggle to find peace in Ukraine, European leaders themselves have proven they care little about peace or even democracy. They give their blind support to war in Ukraine even though its leader, Volodymir Zelensky, runs an authoritarian regime that allows no opposition. They actually care little about Ukraine. Their sole aim is to keep the United States on board as their protector and benefactor.

 

Europe’s decline as a Western model of democracy and good government is painful for this writer, a former resident of Germany and son of a German mother and an American father who fought for Europe’s freedom against tyranny in World War II. Today’s Europe veers toward being unrecognizable under its incompetent leadership and with the growing presence of migrants who are as autocratic and anti-democracy as the countries they fled.

 

From far away, Russia and China watch as Trump bullies his way across the continents and as Europe falls ever deeper into irrelevance. They are powers that bullies like Trump are wary to confront directly, and they are led by seasoned leaders who understand the chess game Trump treats as checkers. When will they say, “Enough is enough”?

 

I left Vietnam a year or two before the ultimate disaster, when U.S. helicopters full of fleeing Vietnamese and Americans scrambled to lift themselves from Saigon’s rooftops to escape the ignominy of utter defeat.

 

Maybe Trump should have not avoided the draft and spent a little time in Vietnam himself. Already in Venezuela, militias and underground forces are gathering to oppose Trump’s plans for their country. The Bolivarian Revolution led by Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro is alive and well. Like Vietnam, Venezuela has plenty of jungles and mountains where its revolutionaries can hide and launch attacks and mount a potentially long, disastrous war, the kind of war Trump campaigned against.

Was the old warrior Sitting Bull a visionary of future conflicts in the United States?

 

(Sitting Bull in 1883)
 

Sitting Bull, the great Sioux chief, had finally found a degree of peace for his people in Canada in 1877 when the U.S. War Department sent a delegation to try to convince him to return to the United States. Surrender your firearms and your horses, and we will grant you a full pardon, they told him.

 

The truth was Sitting Bull’s very existence was an insult to the U.S. military. He was a legend who had successfully resisted their efforts to silence him forever. He was “a dangerous symbol of subversion,” as writer Dee Brown tells the story in his 1971 classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

 

“There is no use in talking to these Americans,” he told Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner James MacLeod. “They are all liars, you cannot believe anything they say.”

 

Sitting Bull knew of what he spoke. The long, sordid trail of broken promises, greed, and rampant racism that the American settlement of the West had left behind was well known to Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Cochise, and other great Indian leaders. Many had felt it better to die on the battlefield than simply fall prey defenseless to a purposeful genocide.

 

Brown’s book, subtitled “An Indian History of the American West”, makes for painful reading, but it is also instructive of this nation’s long history after the settlement of the West. From the Gilded Age of Rockefellers, Morgans, and Carnegies and their brutal rise to economic power to the strike-breaking militias that kept tenant farmers and cotton mill workers in a kind of human bondage to the anti-communist witch hunts of the early and mid-20^th century,  the stage was set for the broken promises of the post-Cold War era  when the United States ruled as the sole super power.

 

It’s a history that prompts another quote from Sitting Bull. “The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.”

 

After decades of CIA-prompted coups in places as disparate as Iran, Honduras, and Libya, all in the name of promoting “democracy” even if the result was anything but, a reckoning seems to be coming in Ukraine.

 

As the Soviet Union tottered in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it agreed to allow the reunification of Germany so long as NATO did not expand eastward. No worry, American officials told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. NATO will not expand one inch to the East. What happened? NATO expanded right up to Russia’s borders and included Poland, the Baltic states, and potentially Ukraine. Allegedly a “defense” organization, it even waged war with longtime Russian ally Serbia in the 1990s.

 

Ukraine, however, was the red line to the Russians. American leaders rarely study history and likely had no real idea that Ukraine has an almost mystical place in Russian history, in many ways the core of ancient Russia. Plus, just like the U.S. didn’t want Soviet missiles in Cuba in the early 1960s, Russia didn’t want a hostile, missile-ladened NATO member on a large swath of its border, particularly after the CIA-backed coup of 2014 in Ukraine that overthrew a Russian-friendly leader with pro-West puppets. Those puppets would go on to wage war with Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens in the nation’s east.

 

Today, President Trump has initiated a new round of peace talks to end the war in Ukraine. Russia is willing to listen. However, Ukraine’s leaders and their Russophobe European buddies don’t seem willing to give an inch even though Ukraine is clearly losing the war.

 

After failed earlier peace agreements at Minsk and Istanbul, Russia will approach any new peace deal with an understandable amount of skepticism. Trump, although volatile to a fault, seems to really want peace, unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, a neocon warmonger who would’ve truly continued the war until the last Ukrainian soldier fell to a bitter and useless death.

 

Chances seem slim for a real peace deal that doesn’t follow complete defeat on the battlefield. Too many political careers and stuffed bank accounts stand in the way. Kudos to Trump for trying, however, if that’s really what he’s doing. After all, he bombed Iran at the same time he was negotiating with them.

 

If the West’s negotiators are anything less than serious about wanting peace in Ukraine, they may hear Russian leader Vladimir Putin say something similar to what Sitting Bull said when pushed for a peace deal in 1877. “I would like to know why you came here,” he said. “You come here to tell us lies, but we don’t want to hear them. … Go back home where you come from.”

A Labor South organization forms to train young people in labor history and organizing and thereby challenge Trump-inspired anti-unionism

(an 1882 cartoon in Puck magazine satirizing the Knights of Labor's first annual picnic)
 

Between the Knights of Labor’s founding in 1869 and its convention in Richmond, Virginia, in 1886, the local press and political leadership condemned it for opening its doors to all races and sneered at its recruitment of both skilled and non-skilled workers--from coal miners and turpentine workers to dockworkers. Its membership eventually reached an estimated 700,000.

 

Although the bloody Haymarket Affair in Chicago the same year as that Richmond convention would bring a death blow to the future of the Knights of Labor, the all-inclusive union would go on to help inspire the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, in 1905 and the rise of the Congress of Industrial Workers in the 1930s.

 

Before its demise it gained considerable success in the allegedly anti-union South, joining with, for example, the New Orleans-based Central Trades and Labor Assembly, also a bi-racial organization with up to 10,000 members.

 

The Knights of Labor spirit today can perhaps even be felt in the creation of the modern-day Labor South organization. Not to be confused with this decade-plus-old blog, the Labor South: Center for Working Class Studies is a North Carolina-based, region-wide organization that seeks to grow the labor movement through education, training, and organizing. Apprenticeships, training certification, independent courses in labor history and organizing, and media and union collaboration are all included in the organization’s plans and goals.

 

“Through independent study courses, students can gain a deeper understanding of how the labor rights movement has impacted their local community and how it continues to do so,” Labor South director Melinda Wiggins says.

 

 This writer has long lamented the absence of labor history in U.S. history courses. As a (now retired) professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi for more than 30 years, I made sure my Media History students knew all about the 1886 Haymarket Affair as well as other landmark moments of labor history such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City’s Lower East Side in 1911 and the textile strikes in North Carolina in the late 1920s and 1930s. I didn’t preach. I did what a teacher is supposed to do: teach.

 

Other efforts are underway in these troubling times that pose a challenge to the neoliberal, corporate-controlled world modern capitalism has created. A nascent Labor Party has been founded, a People’s Party as well. The Southern Workers Assembly in North Carolina is also gaining momentum.

 

Certainly the times are calling for such efforts. Despite President Trump’s campaign appeals to the working class, his administration has proven an enemy of workers. He has gutted the National Labor Relations Board, nominating Morgan Lewis attorney Crystal Carey to serve as NLRB General Counsel. Morgan Lewis is one of the nation’s most vicious union-busting law firms. He fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and NLRB Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox.

 

Trump’s erstwhile buddy Elon Musk has even gone to court claiming the NLRB is unconstitutional.

 

Trump has stripped 800,000 federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.

 

As for the economy, Trump’s first administration authorized tax cuts in 2017 with 82 percent of the cuts aimed at the nation’s top 1 percent. In his current administration he wants another $4 trillion in tax cuts. Guess who benefits?

 

The people of the United States are watching. A recent Gallup poll showed 68 percent of Americans support labor unions. That’s a number you’d think would impress hapless national Democrats, yet their soothsayers keep telling their candidates to go moderate, not left. In other words, more lip service than action regarding labor unions.

 

Despite his miserable, war-mongering foreign politics, former President Biden was something of a modern-day Democratic exception on labor. He did try in several ways to live up to his boast of being the “most pro-union” president in the nation’s history. In a recent edition of the publication International Union Rights, writer John Logan calls attention to Biden’s pro-labor appointments to the NLRB, his bailout of the Teamsters’ pension funds, and his appearance on a United Auto Workers picket line.

 

Donald Trump and his crowd will never appear on a picket line unless it’s to bust some strikers’ heads.  As Labor South and other organizations try to educate people about who’s on their side and who’s not, maybe enough will realize their side, if united, has the power to throw the bums out.

 

The world needs cartoonist Art Young to come back and remind us of the evils of war

(To the right, a drawing of Art Young by the Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco)
 

OXFORD, Miss. – During a casual visit to the University of Mississippi library this week, I happened across a couple of books by and about Art Young, the revolutionary turn-of-the-century artist whose cartoons dramatized the issues of his day in publications such as the Chicago Inter-Ocean, New York American, The Liberator, and the socialist monthly The Masses.

 

Born of modest means in Illinois, Young (1866-1943) championed the poor and downtrodden, and he was so virulently anti-war that he and others at The Masses were charged under the Espionage Act with conspiracy to obstruct enlistment during World War I. The trial ended in a hung jury.

 

With wars raging in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere, the world needs an Art Young today. With U.S. backing, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu continues his genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Israel’s war machine has also targeted Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

 

(A drawing of war by Art Young)
 

As for the war in Ukraine, U.S. President Trump broke with his warmongering predecessor Joe Biden when he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska in an effort to map out a viable peace plan. The Russians are clearly winning the war and unlikely to make significant concessions, but Putin’s arrival in Anchorage signaled a willingness at least to hear what the other side has to offer.

 

Trump had hardly said goodbye to Putin before he had to meet with Ukrainian strongman Volodymir Zelensky and the leaders of France, England, Germany, and Italy in the White House to calm their rattled post-Anchorage nerves. How small those leaders looked in their White House photo-ops.

 

These European leaders, including their counterparts at NATO and the European Union, simply want more war. They could care less about the continued massive loss of Ukrainian lives. They fear the end of the war may only bring about a disinvestment of the United States from Europe, their greatest fear of all.

 

Zelensky wants the continued funding that war brings. How much of it goes into his and his buddies’ pockets? Plus he dares not offend the neo-Nazis that are the power behind the scenes in Ukraine with concessions to the Russians, such as allowing Russia to absorb the Donbas in eastern Ukraine or Crimea (all of which it already largely controls militarily).

 

The warmongers in Congress, the State Department, and within Trump’s own administration want Russia defeated so they can move on to war with China. A war with Iran in the meantime would be delicious. U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., is the unofficial chief warmonger among them.  His predecessor in Congress, the late U.S. Rep. Mendel Rivers, as chair of the House Armed Services Committee is said to have laden the city of Charleston with so much military that it threatened to sink the city into the ocean.

 

Mainstream media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, television networks, and their European counterparts—want what their Deep State friends and former elite university classmates want: War and more war if it promises to weaken Russia and continue their exalted status quo at home.

 

Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, such as the one his despised political enemy Barack Obama won. He campaigned as a peace candidate and boasts of already ending several smaller wars across the globe. However, Trump exhibits little understanding of true diplomacy or of the history that led to the wars in Ukraine--or the Middle East for that matter. His forte remains “the art of the deal,” the skills he learned wheeling and dealing on Wall Street.

(To the right, a drawing by Art Young of Jesus the Peacemaker)

 

Putin, the most capable and mature leader on the world stage today, wants a neutral Ukraine that poses no security threat to Russia. He wants fair treatment of the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine, and before the war would have settled with a real and committed promise to make those goals realities. However, too many have since died simply today to settle for the oft-broken promises of the past.

 

Putin has no desire to extend Russian power into Europe. He doesn’t even want all of Ukraine. If he did, why did he earlier sign on to the peace deals in Istanbul and Minsk that Ukraine agreed to but later broke?

 

Trump has pushed for a Putin-Zelensky meeting. However, Putin does not consider Zelensky to be a legitimate leader of Ukraine since his legal term ended long ago and he has used the war to continue his reign (much like Netanyahu in Israel). Talk of security guarantees in Ukraine as a way to peace has circulated in Washington and across European capitals. However, the Russians will never allow NATO or other European troops in Ukraine as that would undermine the very reasons for the war itself.

 

Ukraine is going to have to surrender much of its eastern provinces and Crimea to Russia. It is going to have to give up ever joining NATO. It’s going to have to allow limits on its future military capabilities, and it is going to have to get rid of Volodymr Zelensky. The West is simply going to have to accept all this even if it ultimately requires a total military defeat for Ukraine.

 

Such are the costs of war. In his art long ago, Art Young showed us the evil of war, its futility, its costs. Two world wars and countless smaller-but-still-deadly wars later, world leaders have yet to listen.

 

The global debt crisis in Argentina and elsewhere owes a lot to Marco Rubio and his friend the hedge fund vulture, Paul Singer

(Marco Rubio)
 

Marco Rubio today may be the head honcho at the U.S. State Department, but it was just a few years ago that he was pounding on the door of that same government entity demanding that it force the government of Argentina to pay Wall Street hedge fund vulture Paul Singer billions in interest on outstanding loans even at the risk of the country going into default.

 

Due to the largesse of his erstwhile political foe Donald Trump, Rubio today gets to hop-scotch around the world, scold other countries for their moral failures, and promote the neoliberal economic model that has made debt a major issue around the world, forcing countries like Argentina to slice pensions, eliminate teacher jobs, and destroy safety nets for the poor so that they can pay Shylocks like Singer their usury.

 

“He is accustomed to thinking about American foreign policy as a responsible policy maker,” Singer said back in 2015 when he threw his substantial financial support to Rubio’s presidential campaign. “He is ready to be an informed and assertive decision-maker.”

 

Today Argentina, under its Trump wannabe leader Javier Milei, is not only still reeling in debt ($40 billion to the International Monetary Fund, and Milei is seeking another $20 billion from the United States) but also from deepening poverty, disappearing government services, and from the fact that some 40,000 former government workers are out of a job due to the chainsaw-wielding Milei.

(To the right, Javier Milei, photo by Gage Skidmore)

 

Milei has cut inflation down from a monthly 25 percent to just 2 percent, but prices are still high in tango land, and pensioners in particular are suffering from the combination of high cost of living and reduced services.

 

Rubio’s friends on Wall Street actually have forced Argentina into default twice—once in 2001 and again in 2014. Here’s how it works: Hedge fund operators purchase the bonded debts of struggling nations and then eventually demand full payment, which with interest can be 10 to 15 times the original debt. With the backing of friendly judges, these “vultures”—tagged that name by Peronist former Argentine leader Christina Fernández de Kirchner—can ignore debt restructuring plans and warnings of default with their insistence on full payment.

 

Argentina actually had worked out a deal with most of its bondholders that would have created a repayment plan albeit with some losses on their investments. Hedge fund operators, however, got involved, bought the bonds at a hugely reduced price (due to the 2001 default), and rejected any such deal. They were backed by U.S. courts.  

 

(Paul Singer)
 

Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, is estimated to have taken in $2.4 billion from Argentina, as much as 15 times the original debt. The fund bought $50 million in Argentine bonds and essentially sold them back for $2.4 billion.

 

It was Rubio, as a U.S. senator from Florida, who kept “banging on the State Department” door, according to journalist Greg Palast, to let Singer have his way in Argentina. “This was money screaming,” Palast said in an interview with Democracy Now.

 

These financial wheeling and dealings aren’t just in Argentina. Global debt is a huge crisis. According to Maryknoll magazine writer Thomas Gould, nearly half of the world’s population “lives in countries that spend more on debt than on either education or healthcare.”

 

The debt arises out of loans provided by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and private lenders. The Oxfam organization estimates those private lenders control more than 50 percent of this debt.

 

Maryknoll, a Catholic publication, notes that the late Pope Francis made debt cancellation a primary focus of his papacy.

 

“The usurer is worse than Judas,” St. Anthony of Padua said back in the 13^th century. “The traitor, having sold the Blood of his Divine Master, brought back to the priests and princes the thirty pieces he had received, but the usurer guards and keeps his unjust gains.”

 

A new pope whose name implies strong support for workers' rights and thus friction with Donald Trump and the world's neoliberal elite

(Pope Leo XIV, photo by Edgar Beltran of The Pillar)
 

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare has Juliet ask in his play Romeo and Juliet. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

 

The great bard can be possibly challenged in the case of Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost. The new pope, the first to come from the United States, is not only following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Pope Francis, but also Pope Leo XIII, a late 19^th century cleric who essentially established modern-day Catholic social teaching with his 1891 encyclical letter Rerum Novarum (The Condition of Labor).

 

Workers have the right to receive a fair wage and to organize into workers’ associations such as unions, Pope Leo XIII wrote. Employers must assure an environment at the workplace that respects worker dignity.

 

Pope Leo XIII “saw the need for the Church to speak for the workingman, and he inspired Catholics to make the laborer’s cause their own,” non-Catholic historian Richard L. Camp once wrote. “Had he done nothing else his place in history as a great pope would still have been secure.”

(To the right, Pope Leo XIII)

 

Thus, what the papacy of Leo XIV portends is potential friction between the church and not only neoliberal rule in Europe and elsewhere in the West but also with right-wing populist Donald Trump’s administration in the United States.

 

Neoliberalism is a philosophy that extols free trade, restrictions on labor unions, top-down rule at the workplace, and minimal government involvement in the lives of people unless it is to promote the ruling elite. The European Union constitution "enshrines neoliberal economics," union activist and journalist Enrico Tortolano wrote in openDemocracyUK. "The European Union is a corporatist, pro-capitalist establishment" that is "anti-worker and anti-democratic."

 

Witness the EU's relentless push for “austerity” measures in economically troubled countries like Greece, forcing strictures on the social safety net for millions, while its non-popularly elected leaders do all they can to assure anti-EU politicians don’t get elected in member countries.

 

For all his blue-collar support in the last election, Trump has shown little or no empathy for workers, gutting the National Labor Relations Board and buddying up to union busters like Elon Musk.

 

Trump fired NLRB Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox and General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. A federal judge has ruled that Wilcox’s removal from the board was illegal. Trump wants to replace Abruzzo with Crystal Carey of the union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis.

 

The long tradition of Catholic social justice inspired by Rerum Novarum includes labor priests like Monsignor George Higgins in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and Father Charles Owen Rice in Pittsburgh and social activists and writers like Dorothy Day. Rice, a native of Ireland, lamented how so many Irish and other Catholic immigrants to the United States, once loyal to the Democratic Party, have switched to the Republican Party. He called it "another cross in my old age."

 

Of course, today's Democratic Party, like the labor parties of Europe, is no longer a pro-union bastion. Ever since Jimmy Carter and especially Bill Clinton, it has been as neoliberal as the Republican Party. In fact, rebellions in both parties over the past decades--from the Tea Party to Bernie Sanders' campaigns--have been prompted at least in part by growing disgust with neoliberalism.

 

The spirit of Rerum Novarum continues to enlighten church social teaching. For example, the 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church called labor unions “a positive influence for social order and solidarity, and are therefore an indispensable element of social life.” Unions carry a strong responsibility in “the whole task of economic and social development and in the attainment of the universal common good.”

 

Pope Leo XIV, who served many years as a bishop in Peru, has now the opportunity to be a powerful force for human rights and, as his name implies, worker rights. How he interacts with a world often hostile to such issues will be interesting to watch.

Starbucks organizer Jaz Brisack sounds the call to "Get on the job and organize" in a new book laying the groundrules for successful organizing in a revitalized labor movement

Here it is, May Day 2025, and a perfect time to file this post on the visit this week by labor organizer Jaz Brisack to Oxford, Mississippi, to promote the activist’s new book, Get On The Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World. This writer interviewed the new author at an event at Off Square Books in Oxford April 30.

 

Jaz, echoing Joe Hill, wants us to “Get on the job and organize!”

 

 Before he was executed by firing squad for murders he didn’t commit in 1915, Industrial Workers of the World organizer and troubadour Joe Hill urged his followers, “Don’t waste any time in mourning, organize!”

 

Jaz Brisack, a veteran of the unsuccessful United Auto Workers campaign at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, and the leading organizer in the successful unionization of Starbucks shops across the country, has answered Joe Hill’s call. The 27-year-old Rhodes and Truman scholar went to work as a barista at a Starbucks shop in Buffalo, New York, soon after her stint as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England, and by December 2021 workers there voted union.

 

Soon Starbucks baristas were voting union across the country, and Brisack became a labor star. Interviews with National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Guardian followed.

 

Other campaigns also followed—the Tesla plant in Buffalo, Ben & Jerry’s—and now a book as well as duties at the Inside Organizer School, where Jaz helps train future organizers who work at a workplace first and then organize next.

 

A former student of this writer at the University of Mississippi’s School of Journalism and New Media, Jaz has been on a labor crusade since learning about long-ago labor heroes like Eugene Debs, Albert Parsons, and Joe Hill as a young girl.

(To the right, Joe Hill)

 

“Labor history is full of heroic struggle, courage, care, solidarity, collective action, fortitude, hope, joy, defeat, and martyrdom,” Jaz writes in Get On The Job And Organize. “People don’t start unions to extract small improvements. They start unions to fight for their rights, a voice, workplace democracy, and greater dignity and freedom. Organizing enables workers to define themselves in terms of their humanity, not in terms of their productive value to a corporation.”

 

The book is full of gems—from a discussion of how big union bureaucracy and interference can kill organizing momentum such as what happened in the Tesla campaign to Jaz’s analysis of how even a losing campaign can be a labor victory by creating solidarity and labor consciousness among workers who never before had those feelings.

 

Taking up an issue that this writer has addressed many times—how identity politics has often served corporate interests by pitting people against one another and blurring the importance of class and economic issues—Jaz sees unions as the best solution to such divisions. In doing this, Jaz echoes Martin Luther King’s belief that seating rights in buses don’t amount to much without economic rights.

 

“Without class liberation, other forms of liberation aren’t possible,” Jaz writes. “As we saw at Starbucks, support for LGBTQ+ rights without union rights equals pinkwashing. Oppressed groups cannot secure liberation without also winning economic liberation, and unionizing offers the only way to do that.”

 

Joe Hill would be proud.

 

When it comes to Ukraine and Russia, war-mongering neoliberals could learn a thing or two from Karl von Clausewitz

(Karl von Clausewitz)
 

The 19^th century Prussian officer and famed military theoretician Karl von Clausewitz wrote about Napoleon’s failed campaign to conquer Russia in 1812. After failing to drive the English out of Portugal and thus being unable to secure victory in Spain, Napoleon wanted to “avoid being involved in a similarly tedious and costly defensive struggle, upon a theater so much more distant,” Russia.

 

“In the case of Russia, he had against him the prodigious extent of the empire, and the circumstance of its having two capitals (Moscow and St. Petersburg) at a great distance from each other,” von Clausewitz wrote.  Still, Napoleon hoped “the weakness of the Russian government and the dissension which he might hope to succeed in establishing” might overcome the disadvantages.

 

Napoleon was wrong, as his disastrous campaign in Russia proved. Hitler would learn a similar lesson in the next century.

 

Fast forward to the 21^st century, and the neoliberal dream of regime change in Russia that would lead to its disintegration into various republics open to Western exploitation. This was the dream that prompted President Bill Clinton to lead NATO into the bombing of Serbia—long one of Russia’s staunchest allies—in the 1990s. This was the dream that prompted then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to assist and applaud the overthrow of the duly elected, Russia-friendly government of Ukraine in 2014.

 

Today, signs finally exist that the futile proxy war between the United States and Russia in Ukraine may finally end as President Donald Trump upends 30 years of anti-Russian meddling and warmongering. That Trump, the bombastic, wheeling-and-dealing former real estate mogul, is leading the charge for peace is no less profoundly ironic than old commie-baiter Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, re-establishing relations with what was once a feared enemy.

 

Trump’s motivations may be simply his desire not to be overseeing a costly losing war. For Ukraine has indeed lost the war. Its troops are surrounded in Russia’s Kursk region. It steadily loses ground to the Russians along its eastern provinces. Its troops are decimated, dispirited, and desperate.

 

Yet, the neoliberals in Washington and especially across western Europe still pine for war and more war in their desire to punish and de-centralize Russia while finally ending Vladimir Putin's 25-year reign. They stupidly actually believe Ukraine could defeat Russia. The ghosts of Napoleon and Hitler finally get to laugh in hell.

 

England’s Keir Starmer, a modern-day labor leader who like his contemporaries in the U.S. loves war and hates Russians, actually believes Britain’s tiny military might can help prevent Russia from overrunning Europe (as if Putin’s Russia has any remote intention of doing that). Same goes for France’s Emmanuel Macron, who loves to rattle those sabers like some modern-day would-be Charles de Gaulle, if not quite Napoleon Bonaparte.

 

Of course, their guy in Ukraine is former comedian Volodymr Zelensky, a would-be strongman in his own country after shutting down all opposition, politically and media-wise. Zelensky got a dressing down in the White House, however, a couple weeks ago, something he’s not used to, after challenging Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s views on the war and Ukraine’s prospects.

 

At that dressing down, Zelensky lied repeatedly, saying Russia had broken peace agreements 15 times, ignoring the fact that it was Ukraine and the West, not Russia, that ultimately violated the two Minsk agreements and another peace initiative in Istanbul. Did mainstream media fact-check his idiotic claims? Of course, not.

 

Now there’s talk of a ceasefire with Ukraine and Europe quickly signing on to a deal that has little in it for Russia, but plenty for them—time to rebuild Ukraine’s defenses, pump more money into its weapons systems, and meanwhile make Russia look like its breaking the deal, not them.

 

Still, it may have been a fine diplomatic slight of hand on the Trump team’s part that got England and France even to endorse the idea of a ceasefire, thus interrupting their incessant cry for more war.

Putin says he’s all for a ceasefire in principle, but “nuances” exist that need to be addressed. He’s winning the war so why should he concede unnecessary ground to an enemy who is losing? Believe me, Putin remembers former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitting that the West and Ukraine only signed on to the Minsk agreement to give Ukraine time to re-arm.

 

You don’t stay in power in the Kremlin for 25 years by ignoring the lies told you in the past when you’re dealing with the same liars.

 

Like Napoleon, Zelensky, Starmer and Macron believe time and continued war may ultimately expose what von Clausewitz called “the weakness of the Russian government” and cause enough dissension to allow for a Ukrainian victory. 

 

Thank goodness, Donald Trump is giving them a lesson in what the Germans used to call “Realpolitik”.

 

USAID, a front for the CIA, helped foment the Hong Kong protests that put Lee Cheuk-yan in prison

(Lee Cheuk-yan in his Hong Kong office in 2013)

 

President Trump’s current crackdown on USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) and revelations of its close relationship with the CIA and its efforts to undermine foreign governments brought back memories of my time in Hong Kong back in 2013 when I witnessed the huge pro-democracy protests there that years later led to a severe crackdown by the Beijing government.

 

Huge protests in 2019 succeeded in getting the city’s government to drop a hated extradition bill that would have sent criminal suspects to mainland China. However, the protests continued and broadened into a giant, ill-fated movement that Beijing could no longer tolerate. They continued in part due to the meddling of organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

 

A trip down memory lane …

 

Lee Cheuk-yan was a busy man the day I interviewed him at his Hong Kong office in 2013. A member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong as well as chair of the Hong Kong Labour Party and leading democratic activist, he had to interrupt the interview to swing over to the council in session in the same building to make brief comments on an issue under consideration.

 

We talked about the recent 40-day dockworkers strike and his role in organizing the annual pro-democracy vigil in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park.

 

“We have to support independent unions, and at the same time, democratic rights,” Lee told me. “We also have the need to support democracy in China. Unless there is democracy in China, it will be far more difficult for Hong Kong to have a real democracy.”

 

Today Lee Cheuk-yan sits in prison, serving two concurrent 18-month sentences for his role in pro-democracy rallies. He has been in prison since early 2021.

 

Lee is one of several leading activists who ended up in prison after the massive pro-democracy protests of 2019 led to Beijing’s crackdown.  Rallies such as that in Victoria Park are now banned, and their leaders are behind bars.

 

Lee might not be in prison if the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID, both fronts for the CIA in its efforts to promote subversion in areas not committed to Western interests, had not interfered.

 

Journalist Dave Lindorff, a veteran China watcher, insists the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong was always home-grown and home-led, but he acknowledges Western organizations likely interfered.

 

“Clearly, the agents of US imperialism are tireless—and utterly without principle … in their efforts to use people,” Lindorff wrote in Counterpunch way back in 2014.  “What we on the left who oppose US empire should be doing is … working to insist that the US government and its secretive agencies of imperialism butt out of Hong Kong.”

 

Although mainstream media has largely ignored USAID’s close ties to CIA subversion, alternative media abound in reports of how the $40 billion-plus organization has been key to efforts over the decades to foment pro-West protest and rebellion in nations such as Ukraine, Cuba, Georgia, Bolivia, Peru, and Haiti.

 

What mainstream media report is USAID’s role in feeding hungry children in Africa and working to contain AIDS and other diseases. They say nothing about how it helped fund the coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 1991 and 2004, worked to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba, worked behind the scenes to make sure opposition parties didn’t challenge the Philippines’ close relationship to the U.S.

 

Trump has fired the inspector general for USAID and appears to be working to dismantle the organization entirely and move its operations into the State Department.

 

If all USAID did was feed hungry children in Africa, it might not have come under the scrutiny of the Trump Administration.  USAID’s bloated budget, more than its covert activities, likely inspired Trump’s attack on the agency.  

 

Still, Trump’s actions have pulled the cover off USAID and exposed its role in interfering with the politics and governance of nations around the world. You won’t read or hear about it in the mainstream media, but who reads or listens to them any more anyway?