History – Page 8 – Ariel Sheen

First Seven Jobs; or How I Learned to Love Workers Collectives

While co-workers or workers in the same field will often talk about the conditions of their employment, most of the time “shop talk” gets shut down as a topic of conversation. Understandably so, as at least from my experience it’s primary functional is a form of catharsis rather than attempt to reach a solution to recurrent, everyday problems. Unions used to prove an avenue and forum for workplace issues, however as you can see from the below chart, many of those who first grew up in the 80s haven’t had such a practical-democratic experience.

Union Wages — Union density and wages over time – break this down into more complicated graphs and it gets even scarier

This directly relates to the crisis of legitimacy in political institutions that has been becoming more exacerbated as wealth inequality has reached dramatic proportions. If we value the preservation of the conditions which allow for the flourishing of genuinely democratic institutions, this much change and collective decision making must increase.

All that said, since a number of people are now posting on social media their first seven jobs, I wanted to do the same – but in such a way so that people will understand why I support unions/workplace democracy. I think the anecdotes herein will show that though management often views themselves as superior to “regular employees,” they are often not and thus the pay and power dynamic gap which exists is largely unjustified. Speaking of power dynamics at play, please notice how I’ve excluded my work experience in my current field education. What that means is up to you to figure out. That said, on to the first seven jobs!

(1) Regal Movie Theaters

My first “real” job, even though the pay wasn’t great I received a few cash bonuses as I always enthusiastically recited the upsell prompts we were supposed to say and mystery shoppers validated that I did this. That was nice, but working concessions in general was awful. The manager verbally degraded me for weeks after I’d unwittingly hit on his girlfriend at the ticket counter as I wasn’t yet in on the open secret. He’d frequently mess with my schedule. Sometimes, right after clocking in for a shift, he would told me to go home “because they were overstaffed”. I’ve worked in enough service jobs since to know that this is sometimes the case, however I was the only one that this ever happened to and he’d also consistently assign me to hours that were illegal under Florida law as I was 16.

Even at 30 hours a week, while being in 10^th grade full time, the pay barely covered the cost of gas and insurance for my car. Employees frequently stole from the tills. One day I came in and learned that several cashiers and an assistant manager had been fired for this The girlfriend, of course, became the new assistant manager. Three months after I left, this manager was arrested for embezzling $40,000 from the operations.

(2) Taco Bell

I was awarded employee of the month three of the four months I worked here. I found out that one of the other drive-thru employees I sometimes worked with had a side job of selling marijuana while on the clock. The store manager had let the night manager know that this was OK as none of the other people who had worked there before Larry (not his real name) had done a job half as good as him nor stayed more than a month. Larry, who was so charismatic I admit I looked up to him a little, even managed to keep his job after he got caught being in collusion with one of the line cooks for occasionally not ringing up orders but making it anyway and pocketing the money after the split.

When I asked what was going to happen – she said that she was going to keep a better eye on him and then admitted that her job was primarily to keep the place running smoothly, and that meant little issues like those above, as long as corporate didn’t found out, was fine with her. She said after a preamble stressing her age and life experience, that she wasn’t paid enough to worry that much about these little things.

(3) PacSun

Four hours into my third day working, I informed the manager that I was going to clock out and take my break. He said that he was fine with my clocking out, but after I did so I was to work the next thirty-minute break mandated by Florida Law because they had to get the newest shipment out onto the floor. I said I wouldn’t do that. He said that if that was my attitude, then I should leave. I did.

(4) Books-A-Million

The cents-above-minimum wage pay meant again that morale was low and internal theft was high. One of the managers set the standards of the business operations by openly stealing CDs. He’d put them in the trash in the back office and recover them from the dumpster after closing. After I learned of this I explained to him that Napster made this unnecessary, but his motivation for the theft stemmed from resentment towards the company rather than need for the music.

About three months into my job a new store manager was brought in from another location. I didn’t realize this until a week after he left four months later, but he had initiated sexual relationships with two of the female workers there – 10 and 15 years his junior – by promising them raises and threatening to fire them if they said anything to anyone. He mistakenly mistexed, which lead confused new assistant manager to discover the situation and report it to HR in a fit of rage. The aforementioned manager was not fired, but moved to yet another store. I never investigated of something similar had transpired before or after, but the impression I received was that this company didn’t mind his sexual predation on subordinates as long as he was kept the books clearly updated and the procedures were properly followed.

(5) Hollywood Video

Before Netflix the people of Jupiter, Florida that wanted to get a movie to watch would usually be forced to encounter one of the creepiest and weirdest dudes I’ve ever met to date. He looked like Jeff Albertson from The Simpsons, had a taste for extremely graphic horror films like Face of Death and would make lecherous comments to the young girls that came in alone or in small groups. He would leave me alone in the store sometimes, saying he had to do paperwork in the back. I’d called out to him a few times while we were having an unusual for a Thursday rush but got no response. I went to the back and through the crack in the office area could see that he was pleasuring himself to paused security camera video of a girl that had come in maybe fifteen minutes earlier wearing a bikini top and daisy dukes. I said nothing, finished my shift, and then called in sick the next day. I called the HR department number in the paperwork I’d been given my first day and after told them what happened. After much awkwardness, they said there was nothing they could do about it as there was no real hard evidence or anyone to corroborate my story. I’m sympathetic to this line of reasoning, but it still didn’t sit right with me so the next day I called in again and said I wasn’t coming back and to please just mail my check to me.

(6) Starbucks

Unlike most of the above places, I genuinely liked working here. The tips we made at this time was made prior to the opening of a million other coffee shops in downtown Delray Beach and averaged about $4-5 cash an hour – so a whole extra 1/3 in addition to our base pay.

As part of a Sociology class at FAU, however, I researched the company and learned of a number of issues that reframed my perceptions. For one, just how profitable the company was and roughly how much they were making off of my labor. I did some statistical math based on their own figures and determined that they’d be able to give a wage increase of almost a dollar an hour and still be profitable. At the time they’d just decided to give all of their “partners” who’d been with the company more than a year an extra $1000, but as I was only there for 10 months I was excluded.

I also learned that the Ethos water that we stocked at the time, which had a retail cost of $2.60, had a production/distribution cost of $.07. Given that this marketed as a way of donating money to water-assistance NGOs in Africa and that the percentage turned over equated to $.05 I was rather bothered. I learned that other stores with people also becoming more aware of their exploitation and were unionizing. I tried, without any organizing experience, to do the same and had my hours cut to nothing for two weeks due to a “scheduling mistake”.

(7) HD Repair – Internet Marketing:

In retrospect it seems dumb on my part to trust business owner that asked me to do online reputation management in addition to the content marketing/SEO optimization that I was already doing for him. I had some reservations, but I really wanted to believe Robert Roxberry’s promise that the work I was doing would be that which would launch me into a much larger marketing/content production project that he described the outlines of and that I was able to easily fill in with my imagination. I admit it! I was taken in by the fantasy he presented.

Immediately after I’d finished a month’s of work for him and our contract for marketing services was over, he disconnected my company email, had security disallow me to enter the building to talk to him and threatened to call that cops from me and all because he decided he didn’t want to pay me the second payment on the contract we’d verbally outlined. It came out to me as loss of $3000. I spent some time researching how to take him to small claims court, but then decided to just chalk up the whole thing as a learning experience.

Amusingly enough a few months after I left a class action lawsuit was brought against him by unpaid sub-contractors. Another one was brought by one of the TV manufacturers he contracted for.

Review of “The FARC: The Longest Insurgency”

Written by an investigative journalist who’s spent decades with the FARC, including some times as their captive, Gary Leech’s book The FARC: The Longest Insurgency presents the largest and oldest Marxist-Leninist insurgency movement in North America. They are, I believe, second only in size in the world to the Naxalite movement in India. FARC-EP, the group’s official name, stands for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army.

The origins of the group stemmed from the country’s gross economic inequality and lack of access campesinos had to fertile land. Since Independence, the descendants of the Spaniard ruling class used their access to capital and arms to dispossess indigenous peoples and peasants of their land. Purchasing foreign made goods and directing the state to invest more in men to protect private property than democratic institutions, uneven development transpired in a way that put the people at odds with the State. Inspired by the revolutionary movements in Latin American and abroad that followed the Second World War, the group started advocating and fighting on behalf of the agricultural workers.

The beginning of cocaine production in the Southern/Putumayo region in the 80s gave the organization a new influx of money. Such an influx of money wasn’t without additional problems – as narco-traffickers started buying large tracts of land and dispossessing others until they became the largest class of landowners in the country conflict between the two groups became inevitable. As the Medellin cartel had greater access to capital, they were dominated them though reached a modicum of peace as they needed to redirect their forces to fight the Cali Cartel, which had allied itself with the DEA and the Colombian Government. While reading I was bemused, though not surprised, that the growers in the region under the control of the FARC consistently made more money from their coca crops than did those under the control of the Cartels.

In discussing the issue of human rights as it relates to the FARC, Leech presents a view that is nuanced, yet does not get bogged down in the details. He shows how it conceives of itself, an alternative to the official state that functions as a judiciary and sponsor of economic development in the areas it controls. While he does find some faults with it, compared to the official Colombian state as well as its paramilitary apparatus it is adjudged as the superior adherent to human rights. It’s this and the long history of the organization which ought to justify the categorization of the guerillas as combatants rather than narco-terrorists or, alternately, just terrorists.

Leech addresses a number of the reasons why, despite their clearly not being as responsible for reprehensible acts of terroristic violence against civilian populations as right-wing paramilitaries, they are vilified. For one there is Colombia’s long history of violence against and assassinations of leftists. Such campaigns were not limited only to guerillas but also those journalists who brought greater clarity and context to the stakes of the violence in their writings. Operating under the dialectics of suspicion, those that were considered sympathizers were equated with the actual combatants and seen as fair game for AUC and others. Secondarily, as a covert organization it is difficult to hold press conferences and talk with reporters that are already wary of being seen as sympathetic to the FARC. As a result many reporters fail to investigate the veracity of the press conference spectacles held by the military. Third, the news largely reflects the political interests of the owners. Stories published and broadcast highlight the kidnappings by the FARC for ransom, conceived of as a just response to non-payment of taxes, and typically ignore those narratives about human displacement caused by corporately funded paramilitary operations. Thus the stories of rich people being kidnapped, an act which at it’s height peaked around the 1,200 mark and has since decreased to around the 100s, silences the between 3.2 and 4.9 million people that have been forced to relocate due to violence.

The relationship between the FARC and the Government as well as the United States role in providing assistance to the latter is another area the Leech extensively reports upon. Since the passage of Plan Colombia in 1998, which made the country the second largest recipient of U.S. aide, casualties have mounted and the FARC has lost much of it’s territory. As far as I’m aware the La Gabarra, False-Positives and other scandals that illustrate the depth of cruelty of the Uribe government haven’t made the news, though high profile scandals, such as the kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt and U.S. missionaries have despite the former issues being bloodier.

In his conclusion Leech is not hopeful that there will be peace anytime soon between the AUC, the FARC and the Government as the government has consistently pursued neo-liberal policies and made these exempt from negotiations during their peace accords. Since the conditions that lead to the FARC in the first place aren’t dealt with and the Colombian and U.S. government have made liability for engagement in civilian dispossessions and massacres to protect corporate profits, any future peace is likely not to be long-lasting.

Review of “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson”

Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson are selected letters written by a Black Panther’s Party member who was not involved with the group on the streets of Oakland or elsewhere but one who nevertheless contributed to the group through his articles published through the Party paper. Jackson was convicted of stealing $70 from a gas station and was given a prison sentence of one-year-to-life of which he served eleven years.

The letters cover a five-year period and are addressed to people such as his mother and father as well as radical luminaries such as Angela Davis. In them he describes the psychological effects of being imprisoned by corrections officers that openly voice racist views and encourage violence between the inmates, how he has kept his spirit alive despite almost eight years being in solitary confinement, his views on Amerikan society, education, black culture and the affairs of the third-world. Throughout these letters he displays cutting insights gleaned from reflection on his experience as well as his prodigious reading.

In these letters we Jackson states familiarity with the works of Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Franz Fanon, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and others. These thinkers helped Jackson form a critical analysis of politics, economics, history, and psychology such that he believes that the current struggles for community patrols and armed self-defense from police action will one day turn into a more intensified militant struggle by linking the plight of the poor blacks in the USA to the colonized people abroad.

Making these connections between American military involvement in Indochina with police repression domestically is, he recognizes, incredibly dangerous to the status quo political establishment. He goes so far as to presciently state that t’s likely that he will be killed for stating his views through the articles smuggled out of prison and publicized through the Black Panther Party newspaper. Ten months after the publication of these letters, Jackson was killed allegedly trying to escape.

Despite the above statements about the content of the letters, the majority of them are not short essays by any means. A number of them deal with Jackson trying to proselytize to his father to adopt a more activist, militant stance for how he carries himself in the white world. His intentions are good, Jackson states, but he still defers to white cultural values of how to act proper rather than be assertive. This is considered preferable to the “niggerism” which Jackson decries, which is the replication of white predatory behavior by blacks upon blacks but it still, according to Jackson, perpetuates white supremacist thinking and action. When addressing himself to his mother Jackson is more gentle with in his imprecations

Jackson, like his hero Malcolm X, came to a viewpoint that advocated for black power, but not out of a sense of racial superiority but from a sense of radical revolutionary solidarity with those oppressed in the world. It is perhaps not surprising that he, like so many others that advocated this position in the 60s and were considered leaders of some sort, was murdered but through these at times banal and at times beautiful letters, we get a greater insight into a great soul.

Review of “Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies”

I’d first picked up Judith Stein’s book Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies for my History of Capitalism course at NYU. I’d only read a few chapters, however, and only recently did I decide to review my notes on the book and then complete the unread sections as I slowly start putting together a reading list/syllabus for the history of American neo-liberalism.

Stein’s book is primarily an institutional history from Nixon, the last New Deal president, to Clinton, the New Democrat. Although she does bring up the policies of Bush the Second and Obama, it is largely just to show how they continued to transform regulations and laws to align with neoliberal policy proscriptions suggested and enacted since Carter. The economic polices chosen by the presidents are contextualized within the rapid changes in the global trade networks in the post-WWII/Cold War world, detailed through the domestic circumstances that lead to such decisions and shows how the effects it had on the country’s working people lead to industrial flight and a declining middle class.

American policy makers feared European nations coming under Soviet influence following the second World War. The numerous Communist parties, which had varied relations to the Soviet Union, were initially quite successful in obtaining support. The State Department quickly realized that in order to prevent this they would need to not only engage in political manipulation in various forms but that they also needed to make sure that they received sufficient loans to rebuild their industries, that the status quo in the Middle East was maintained so that oil deliveries would be regular and tariffs lowered so European industries would have a market for their goods while they rebuilt. The loans were easy, however the nationalist revolutions and OPEC made maintenance of such amiable relations difficult and this often made foreign policy considerations direct economic policy. As a result of OPEC’s the oil-producing nations were able to demand higher prices in the 70s, the “greatest non-violent transfer of human wealth in human history” occurred. 2% of industrialized nations GDP went to these countries. As the U.S. lowered trade restrictions and became a market of last resort, domestic industries soon saw sales going increasingly to the goods produced by the newly capitalized EU and Japanese factories.

The focus on presidential campaigns in the beginning third of the book is somewhat slow reading and seems spurious until later when, implicitly, it’s shown how these events helped limit the political options of organized labor. Though the United States has never had the sort of comprehensive industrial policies in the same way that Germany and Japan did, hence assisting capital formation their due to the decreased competition in the domestic industries, Carter and Reagan furthered the anarchy of the market through deregulation that would lead to numerous boom and bust cycles and lead to the U.S. going from a creditor to a debtor nation that consistently maintained unfavorable trade imbalances.

Trilateralists, whose “professional diagnosis” on how to manage the nation’s economy just so happened to be aligned with the interests of the bourgeoisie, dominated Carter’s administration. Carter’s presidency shows an aversion to macroeconomic policies to deal with inflation, dismantling of social safety nets in favor of voluntariast community assistance and antipathy towards organized labor beings the large-scale political movement away from the traditional Democratic base towards business interests. These combined with a tepid economy due to failed auto and steel trade regulation policies and foreign policy problems, such as the Iran Hostage Crisis, leads to a one-term presidency.

Reagan continues much of what Carter had started. His breakup of the PATCO strike was just one of many public displays of antipathy to American unions. In addition to that his private assertions to business owners couple and underfunding of the NLRB and other worker’s protection organizations meant that a full-on offensive by the business community against the New Deal state could work towards unraveling hard-fought workers protections.

Through Stein’s historiography of Carter and Reagan’s presidencies, the pivotal moments of her Pivotal Decade is on full display. With barriers to foreign investment being dropped left and right capital flees overseas and finance, which once played a marginal role in the economy soon becomes a hegemonic sector. Through these dynamics and the turn towards supply-side economic policies – magical thinking on the part of the bourgeoisie economists, the immiseration, both economically and politically, rapidly accelerates and within two generations leads to the destruction of the affluent society now appealed to by right and left.

Review of “Revolutionary Suicide”

A corollary to all of the research I’ve recently undertaken on America’s political and economic development in relation to slavery is a desire to engage with post-emancipation black radical thought. This led me to purchase Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton and a few others that I will be reviewing later.

The book then opens up to a philosophical discourse on the differences between Revolutionary Suicide and Reactionary Suicide. The reactionary suicide is the person who adopts the values, attitudes and beliefs of white, American colonial culture. The form that this takes for black people is either economic predation upon other black people – what Newton calls “the worst form of niggerism” – or just apathy in the face of repression by police and others. Revolutionary suicide is the perspective held by those that are actively antagonistic to such a racist political economy and culture. Newton does not dance around the fact that this is a form of race and class-consciousness that is viewed by many as a systemic threat to institutional racism and that as a result it is very likely that one would be killed for their beliefs and actions. To be a revolutionary is to recognize that one’s life will end from something other than old age or illness. It is an awareness that police and the Klan equate with a target. The way Newton describes it, to be a revolutionary suicide one must have great heroic fortitude.

Newton does not start out a revolutionary but as a sensitive son of a preacher that enjoys poetry and self-improvement through reading. The way he conceives himself, there were two distinct fraternal influences vying for his interest. Sonny Man was a hipster and schemer that operated on the fringes of society without a job but with lots of status symbols while Huey’s other brother Melvin was well read and studying to become a professional. The different approaches to adulthood/freedom was something that for a brief period would divide his psyche.

The honesty with which Newton discloses a number of his early behaviors linked to Sonny Man provides not only a convenient narrative arc for the story – from sinner to saint – but also reflects on his changing principles and values. From a petty thief and pimp to a self-proclaimed defender of the black community is quite a leap – one also made by Eldridge Cleaver – nevertheless the Bay Area was quite a radical environment at the time and rather than continuing to engage in lumpen behavior he starts to formulate a party to help look out for the guys on the street being harassed just for their race.

The impact of Huey’s secondary schooling is at best marginal, being that he describes himself as someone who does not like being forced to learn material that he sees as uninteresting or which perpetuating a narrative of black inferiority. He is a weak reader, but commits himself to rigorous self-study with Plato and Descartes. When he feels that he finally has the capabilities to successfully complete a college course, he decides to enroll. This was a period where African-American studies were beginning to make its way onto registration sign-up sheets and leftist campus activists were plentiful. This engagement with those of a counter-cultural bent and those with Marxist sympathies further contributes to Huey’s appreciation of the intellectual life. Malcolm X, Castro, Marx, Mao, Sartre, DuBois and Fanon are the major philosophes that are referenced here as formative influences.

These people and key authors cause Huey both to question a number of his value and personal practices as well as encourage him to try novel forms of living and engaging communally. First attracted to the Afro-American Association, he later finds the organization too self-serving to those leading it and disconnected from the needs of the people to maintain active membership. Being someone that values the perspective of the normal people on the street, we come to see the emergence of the Black Panther Party as a defense against sociopolitical and economic injustices. In this Newton goes into a number of reflections on the conditions of blacks in America and relates these to the planks which the Panther’s promoted as a path to Black Liberation. The rapid spread of the organization following the Sacramento brouhaha is underdeveloped for my taste, but I’m sure other treatments of the party will be able to answer other questions I had about it.

Towards the end of the book is an extended description of the trial. While important for illustrating a number of the prosecution’s seemingly corrupt practices for getting a conviction, I found that it and the depiction of the jails dragged on. All in all, however, I thought this was great book with insight into Huey’s mind and history!

Some films about the Black Panthers

Review of “Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877”

One of the problems that I have with writing short reviews for very long, detailed books like this is that I must avoid the complexities of the content presented. In a few words I could say that Reconstruction: American’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 by Eric Foner describes the post-Emancipation Proclamation world of the Southern United States and how it went through various stages of Reconstruction, wherein Northern rule held varying degrees of control over the South, to Redemption wherein the previous humanitarianism disappeared and Southern rights reasserted their rule via “state’s rights.” To summarize over 600 pages into this sentence is certainly not fair to the wealth of the research that Eric Foner has done nor accurately describes the vicissitudes of the period. But this is – in a few words – what the book is about. Rather than doing so, for this book I’ll post links to some other reviews that go into extensive detail and also post the essay questions that my students could pick from to answer below as the latter, I believe, shows what the book deals with and the former is available for those that would like a more expository understanding of the material the book contains.

Here is an appraisal and analysis of the book from Reviews in American History: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/gilded/perman.pdf

And here is a review from the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/22/books/a-moment-of-terrifying-promise.html?pagewanted=all

Essay Questions

Chapter 1

The World the War Made

Justify historians Charles and Mary Beard claim that the Emancipation of American slaves was more than just the end of a particular form of a system of labor.
Examine W. E. B. Du Bois’s claim that it was the blacks that led the drive towards Emancipation.
Compare and contrast the economic effects of the war on the North and the South.
Explain how the Civil War helped consolidate the American state.
Evaluate why Northern military policies would vacillate between progressive and regressive.
Describe the ways that the Civil War was the mid-wife of the revolution.
Discuss some of the black institutional responses to emancipation.
Compare and contrast free labor ideology with slavery and assess the validity of the former’s claims
Describe the role of class in the South’s internal civil war.

Chapter 2

Rehearsals for Reconstruction

Describe the rationale for the10 Percent Plan described in Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.
Discuss how the actions of the new Reconstruction governments helped to undermine the perceived legitimacy of their rule.
Compare and contrast the arguments for and against confiscation.
Identify some of the manners in the Banks system and other laws enforced the interests of Southern property owners.
Examine the various roles and responsibilities of the Freedman’s Bureau.
Explain what made the small Sea Islands experiment so worthy of national attention.
Evaluate with examples the army’s role in the transformation to labor policy formation in the occupied south.
Distinguish the causes for black rural and city delegates disagreements on policy formation.
Analyze reasons for the North’s tenuous commitment to emancipation.

Chapter 3

The Meaning of Freedom

Describe some of the manners in which the freed blacks exercised their new freedom.
Contrast black family and social life before and after Emancipation.
Explain the changes that occurred in Black-attended churches following Emancipation.
Identify the reasons for the rise in civil-aid societies.
Examine how land ownership related to the freedman’s desires for economic independence.
Distinguish several manners in which freedman used the new labor conditions to obtain better wages and working conditions.
Compare and contrast the dynamics of farming for self-sufficiency with farming for the market.
To what extent did black political organizations change between 1864 and 1866?
Contrast the waning interest with conventions with the social ferment of the Southern countryside.

Chapter 4

Ambiguities of Free Labor

Describe in detail the economic conditions of the South.
Explain the rationale for planters placing personal life provisions within contracts.
Analyze the conflicts between new northern planters and southern blacks.
Identify the methods by which southern planters and the military now regulated the labor of free blacks.
Discuss the role of the market from the vantage point of freedman, plantation owners and the government.
To what extent did paternalism motivate institutional responses to the conditions in the South.
Identify the limits to the Freedman Bureau’s efficacy.
Examine the role of coercion in the creation of contracts.
To what extent did sharecropping emerge from the post-war economic exigencies.

Chapter 6

The Making of Radical Reconstruction

To what extent do you agree with Thaddeus Stevens claim that the Congress in session in 1866 was “making a [new] nation” and that “technical scruples” ought not to be allowed to prevent them from their statecraft?
Describe in detail the changes sought by the Radical Republicans and their motivations for them.
Compare and contrast the views of Moderate and Radical Republicans
Evaluate the Civil Rights Bill.
Explain the relationship of black and women’s suffrage.
Justify the claims of a number of modern historians that Andrew Johnson was the worst president.
Examine why Eric Foner states that the Reconstruction Act passed by the 39^th session of Congress was a “incongruous mixture of idealism and political expediency”.
Define “states rights” and describe how it played a contentious role in the Congressional debates.
Kanye West recently tweeted: “What is your definition of true freedom? There is no true freedom without economic freedom.” Analyze how this relates to the issues surrounding Reconstruction.

Chapter 8

Reconstruction: Political and Economic

Define and describe the four areas Foner cites which limited the Republicans efforts to reshape southern society and establish their legitimacy.
Compare and contrast the qualities of the government positions obtained by blacks and whites.
Analyze the role of graft & corruption amongst the political parties and races between 1868 and 1872.
Explain how new economic legislation provided more power to blacks.
Describe the social and economic effects of blacks entering into the market economy.
Identify the causes that lead to two plantation regions underdevelopment.
To what extent did state-sponsored economic development contribute to financial crisis?
Examine the goals and outcomes of state-sponsored economic development.
Describe the reasons for the rise of the landlord-merchant class.

Chapter 10

The Reconstruction of the North

Describe the effects the railroads had on the geography and economy of the North and West.
Compare and contrast the relationship between business politics in the frontier areas with that of freedman in the South.
Identify the reasons for the creation of unprecedented income inequality in the North.
Explain the challenges that technological progress made to the free labor ideology once lauded by the Northern elite.
Discuss the differences between black and white experiences of labor.
Distinguish what is meant by the term “professionally managed politics”.
To what extend and by whom was economic legislation considered “dangerous”.
Identify the reasons why Reconstruction was losing its strength as a political force.
Compare and contrast perspectives on government reform.

**********

Also worth checking out is this interview with Eric Foner:

http://nostalgiatrap.libsyn.com/nostalgia-trap-episode-41-eric-foner

Review of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression”

Several years ago I’d heard on NPR an insightful interview of Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. My interest in the work piqued, the book sat with the myriad others on my Amazon Wish List until I started creating a Long Civil Rights course track for the IB History classes I’m teaching and from my experience in the classroom I highly recommend it as a companion book/follow up reading to Reconstruction.

Kelley opens by describing the feudal milieu that Communist Party activists sought to change through the Share Croppers Union. Housing settlements are widely disbursed and are not owned by the farmers that occupy them; there are no social centers besides churches that have their preachers vetted by plantation owners; the caloric options from company provision outlets was poor and yet high-priced. Pay rates were also so poor that farmers relied upon home gardens and “odd jobs” to get by. During periods when they were not harvesting or planting, because their housing wasn’t owned, they had to rely upon company welfare – which was often required to be paid back – or government welfare that is cut as soon as planters needs workers. Any attempts at organizing against such living conditions would often mean forced eviction and beatings.

jamesallen-blackbelt1

If living in this sort of economic deprivation wasn’t discouraging enough, there is then the environment of virulent racism that workers and organizers had to live in. The attempt by black share croppers to demand a more just price for their work based upon the actual commodity prices could lead to murder predicated on the defense of Southern Femininity as it was the planter’s wives that often kept the books for the business. Kelley’s narrative abounds with poor black farmers or political organizers that are kidnapped, beaten, shot or hanged by police. The police also give these people over to vigilante squads and fail to prosecute white people for crimes against blacks.

The Communist Party and it’s associate organization the International Labor Defense rouse sentiments and are able to mobilize against such a socially unequal legal order which made no real effort to prosecute lynchings. This activity was all the more heroic as it accomplished with pushback both from white supremacist organizations such as the KKK as well as the “respectable” NAACP. Representing the aspirations of the burgeoning black middle class that saw many poor blacks denial of enfranchisement as just and the confrontational street-politics of the CPUSA as antagonistic to the white allies they hoped to impress, the NAACP red-baited and sought to undermine the organization’s philosophy while the latter group beat and assassinated it’s members. Based upon their defense of the Scottsboro Boys and their role in winning some strikes for better wages and working conditions, however, they managed to seed themselves in the hearts of many Alabamians before and after the Popular Front Period.

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The radical economic changes brought about by New Deal Policies changes everything. Government subsidies are granted to the owners of large agricultural holdings to industrially mechanize. While there was a small amount of resettlement funds itemized allotted to tenant farmers leaving the plantation, they often did not receive it. This army of unemployed mostly made their way into the mining industry next. There they faced racist, dual unions, similar housing arrangements as before and, following the passage of more repressive legislation, a host of pretexts for police to prevent their freedom of speech and organization. Those that were not able to obtain employment, or those that were fired from the mines, had to deal with a patronizing and intrusive system of welfare distribution.

A slew of Communist party organizers and their sympathizers are assassinated while those that live are socially ostracized by the black middle class and white liberals. Kelley breaks down a number of the considerations of the Popular Front and contextualizes the shift to embedding in the CIO as it rises to prominence and additionally gives a number of biographical sketches that gives compelling background to the CPUSA membership. By bringing in their private lives in addition to the struggles faced as a result of political activity that did not always follow CP directives, Kelley humanizes a group that we learn is more maligned because it represented an alternate ideology of modernism and the eradication of racial privilege rather than it’s slavishness as a fifth column for an “evil” foreign power.

This type of first hand account of developing activity on the ground that is constantly adapting to deal with new and often profound exigencies is quite simply an excellent case-study based way for a modern organizer to understand how to obtain true political allegiances and traction within a community by responding to and anticipating it’s needs. The variety of practical considerations makes it an excellent resource for those interested in political organizing. hammerandhoe

Review of “BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family”

Cause nothing says “low-key” like putting billboards of yourself and your gang name around Atlanta.

I’d first heard about Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family via trap songs where his name gets dropped. I didn’t think much about it at the time but when doing research on gangs in Miami for the novel series I’m writing I came across their name again. I watched a video that Big Meech had released shortly before he went to prison and a documentary after and was intrigued. I came across a series of articles that Mara Shaloup had written about them as well as a book length treatment that she gave them titled BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family, so I decided to read it. I enjoyed the book. It’s light and quick reading and though remembering the names and relationships of people with multiple aliases was a little confusing at first, the chart included in the book helped make things clear.

tumblr_mz3e70V51J1qbo0vfo1_1280 — Guwop so icey.

The story presented is fascinating and illustrates why Big Meech and the gang he started with his brother Terry became so famous within the hip-hop community. The most obvious manner why he has been so celebrated within that community is his promotion of Young Jeezy at the beginning of his career. While not an official signee to the BMF crew, he clearly gained from being associated with BMF members by gaining a greater aura of authenticity. Shaloup touches upon this and also tells an aside story of the conflict between Jeezy and Gucci Mane that left an associate of the former dead following an attempted robbery. Another reason for Meech’s lionization in the rap community is his attempt at going legit through a record label. While Bleu Davinci, an BMF associate that also engaged in cocaine trafficking, was it’s sole signee – it’s likely that it may have one day been a launching pad for rappers. One of the pictures shown in the book is of a conversation between Meechie and Nelly and his connection with Puff Daddy (Meech employed his cousin), T.I. and other important rappers is also detailed. In a way, this dynamic and these interactions seems like Meech wanted his life to imitate the musical art that he and his crew were so fond of.

One of the aspects of the book that I enjoyed was the description of trafficking craft. How certain hidden compartments in cars were created and opened, pay rates for couriers versus traffickers, means of laundering money, the manner of processing the uncut cocaine for distribution to associated seller, the different types of employee relationships that existed, the wildly excessive partying and extravagant purchases, difficulties felt when trying to “stay off the radar”, how relationships were formed with other crews so that wars were avoided, the relationships forged and destroyed over fear. It makes for compelling reading as even though it’s hard to identify with the people being described one still can’t help but wonder at what point someone is going to get caught. While reading I kept feeling wondrous anticipation as to what it was that would lead to someone’s arrest and, once that was done, wondering if they would snitch.

It’s this, in fact, that makes me feel a little uneasy about the celebrity which Meech has received. Shaloup doesn’t delve into these sorts of reflections, sticking more with the journalists craft, however after reading this and a number of the telephone transcripts available for perusal in the very large prosecutorial file on B.M.F. it’s clear the amount of stress that was felt by the individuals involved in the enterprise. The parties were like over the top cathartic releases for they seemed to all recognize that this was a house of cards and thought they were flying high – such heights meant that like Icarus they’d soon come crashing down. The sole factors involved in the safety maintenance of the operation seemed to be Meech’s code of conduct – No talking on the phone and make your employees love you first and also fear you so they don’t snitch – and a few corrupt people in minor government offices that could provide info or fake identification cards. While not sighting the tails that followed them, they all seemed to recognize – as more bodies of innocents and potential witnesses piled up and as police came to see that people which could potentially testify to crimes would clam up on learning who the suspects were – that greater police attention was being paid to them.

While the greater depth of personal insight into “the game” that I was hoping for was not to be found in the book through quotes or any interview with Meech, I found something of the sort while reading an interview. It seems that after a few years in the pen, when his legal options are dried up, his once boisterous, rebellious energy has disappeared. In his own words he states:

I’m crying inside. I’ve been in the hold on ’23 and 1′ [23 hours in cell and one hour out per day] since June 2011. This SMU sh*t is like a torture camp for real. First, showers are only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Both me and my celly have to cuff up whether one of us is leaving to go to rec, shower, or medical, or if both of us are leaving. Everywhere we go, our hands are in black box handcuffs behind our back with a C.O. holding our cuffs, walking with us. I’m always trying to get out of my handcuffs first because you never know when your celly may have a bad day and jump you while you still have your cuffs on.
There’s three or four fights or stabbings daily, especially since it’s hot. If you disobey them, you’ll get a heavy dose of tear gas, which has the whole building choking and coughing, eyes burning. Then they’ll put you in restraints handcuffed extra tight with a chain around your waist, shackled. I’ve heard grown men cry crocodile tears from their hands swelling and nerve damage from the cuffs. If that’s not enough, they have another form of punishment called “Four Points” where they put you on your back chained around both ankles and wrists in a very cold room with the lights on. Everyone who reads this should look up Lewisburg SMU online and read about the deaths, disfigurements, and inhumane conditions and brutality that goes on in here. So, my days are like a living hell.

It’s at this point that I start to agree with some of the people in the comments section of a number of Hip Hop news sites that despite his “success” it was all a big waste.

One of the other aspects that I found interesting in the book is the narratives about BMF associates that tried to start successful side business to launder money and to potentially become a platform to go legit. There was the BMF record label, of course, but within the story Mara also accounts for a recording studio, a high-end car dealerships and a number of other enterprises. Ironically but perhaps not so surprisingly, the successes that BMF had selling drugs was undermined by their failures as actual businessmen. Another irony is that despite all of the criticisms made by Terry against his brother Meech, it was the latter’s generous attitude and willingness to engage in opulent conspicuous consumption at strip clubs and night clubs with his subordinates that motivated them to not snitch on him once caught. Not that their testimony would have been the point on which the prosecution’s case would have rested in full – but it’s worth noting: as a means of maintaining organizational morale, it turns out that warmth and affection rather than coldness and annoyance have a significant impact.

Yet another major irony illustrated in the book is that after the capture of the Black Mafia Family, the drug task force which had helped bring them down gets disbanded following the accidental death of an elderly woman that the Atlanta Police Department tried to frame as a cocaine trafficker. While not widely announced in the paper, the presence was common knowledge amongst the criminal elements in the area and following this trade picked up apace and with greater openness. This time, however, it was largely done by Mexican gangs with military backgrounds that made the 270 million brought in by the Black Mafia Family look like peanuts.

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Some of the original notes and articles from which made the book was written can be found here.

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Review of “A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida”

When it comes to understanding the physical formation of greater Miami A World More Concrete by N. D. B. Connolly was incredibly insightful. The Magic City, so called because of its transformation from frontier town to urban region was by far the fastest of its time. Marketers of the Magic City sought to advertise it, justifiably so, as a Caribbean city for elites to leisure upon. However at variance from the other islands within the temperate climate band – such as Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba – it didn’t have the preponderance of poor blacks that this class found unsettling. Not that they weren’t present, just that they were visible only as help. White terrorism, apartheid passes and Jim Crow police enforcement kept blacks from coming onto the beaches so favored by economic elites. Contestation of such treatment was limited by this as well as conflict between Caribbean and American-born blacks while cultural expressions of resistance to this – as well as the colonial and slave history, such as the Junkanoo parades in the area that would come to be known as Overtown – were geographically distanced far from major tourist areas.

Connolly examines the economics of segregation and the various forms of legal frameworks used to perpetuate racial segregation. Constitutional language – specifically property rights – was the primary means of perpetuating and expanding Jim Crow and New South government policies. While real estate was also a means of creating a Civil Rights political discourse, for taxpayers ought to have the same access to goods (like beaches) and services (like schools), it was not an inherently progressive framework.
Describing in fascinating detail the rhetorical tropes used to perpetuate Jim Crow, Connolly rejects the simplistic narrative that pits the black struggle for civil rights against a white defense of property rights. He limns why and the manner in which class caused propertied and property managing African Americans to embrace the logic and laws of real estate for their own ends. Connolly’s interpretation specifies the creation of class alliances between ruthless white exploitation and the black middle-class. To varying degrees, entrepreneurs, landlords, elected officials, and self-styled urban reformers all participated in eminent domain and land control schemes through mechanisms such as housing associations that helped to take advantage of the black poor. To what extent were poor blacks ruthlessly exploited? As an investment, from the 1930s to the early 1960s, black housing was the most profitable real estate investment that one could make. While rental housing for white Americans would fetch an average rate of return around 6%, for blacks it was an astonishing 27%! Blacks would often pay per week what whites paid per month for rent and it would be significantly lacking the amenities and quality of construction of the types of homes that whites lived in.

Landlords preyed on the fact that blacks had limited capital available to defend their cases in a court system that had not yet taken much account of renters rights, that tenant organizing could be meet with counter-resistance from better financed, organized and politically connected landlords, that a politics of respectability and conference decision making with community leaders determined policy rather than recourse to democratic procedures and that all class conflict would be framed as racial and thus would perpetuate racial sentiments. Landlords as a category was not limited to native-born whites. Blacks, Cubans, Seminoles, Haitians, and other Caribbean groups all invested in segregation to the point at which home ownership within communities vacillated from 10% to 20%. Whites were clearly the predominant holders of capital investment in real estate, while “credit’s to their race” that engaged in similar investments like M. Athalie Range and Luther Brooks gave a gloss of legitimacy to it.

Historiography on urban racial segregation must be embedded within the larger framework of the history of capitalism. Connolly’s close analysis of primary sources allows the reader to expand their understanding of the close and mutually constitutive relationships among liberalism, capitalism, and racism by placing real estate at the center of all. Conflicts over the value of land shaped Miami, indeed all American cities, in ways that social movements, local policy reforms, and legal arguments could not undo. There is almost a perverse creativity to the opportunistic alliances and deceptive actions that informed the geospatial and georacial composition of modern Miami. Eminent domain could be used to dispossess poor blacks of real estate at a lower than market price desired by whites, to force the government to purchase real estate for a higher than market price for housing no longer seen as a desirable investment and to condemn housing that was seen by white homeowners as existing too close to their neighborhoods.

Connolly’s focus on the enduring power of the racist social order and property rights at the heart of Jim Crow sheds new light on the limits a civil rights movement could have when predicated on property-rights. Unfulfilled economic promises and public-private chicanery was not the outliers but the norm. Capitalism and the profit motive thus not only underwrote urban governance and preserved Jim Crow, but also put real estate at the center of Miami’s race relations. The neighborhood case studies of Overtown, Liberty City, Good Bread Alley, Allapatah, Nazarene, Liberty Square, Railroad Shop, and Para Village show how local entrepreneurs were able to exploit the racism underlying the practices of the Federal Housing Authority, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal National Mortgage Association for self-enrichment.

The Expanse and Iberian History and Literature

I wasn’t feeling too well and a science fiction aficionado acquaintance of mine posted praise for a new SyFy show called The Expanse. I decided to give it a try and after watching the first episode I found myself thoroughly absorbed due to it’s compelling characters, intricate plot and high production values. I binged it over the next two days without regrets and look forward to subsequent seasons.

While watching it, I noticed a number of things that weren’t necessarily evident to the average viewer so wanted to share the information informing my enjoyment of it. Spoiler alert to those that have yet to see the show – in order to share my perspective, I have to speak in some detail about a number of points.

The ship Tachi has its name changed to Rocinante

It was upon viewing this name change that a number of previous events in the show took on a new meaning. Tachi is the name of the Mars Class ship that allows James Holden, Naomi Nagata and others to escape attack by an as of yet unknown enemy. Following escape from the battle, the ship is piloted to Tycho Station, an area controlled by Fred Johnson and the Outer Planet Alliance.

Now Rocinante is the name of the not so mighty nag of Don Quixote de la Mancha. Besides the fact that both Rocinantes transport people from adventure to adventure, there’s not much similarity beyond the name. It does, however, hint at a number of interesting signifiers that relates Iberian History and Literature which I touch on below.

Don Quixote is plagued by Enchanters, James Holden is plagued by an unknown Forces

In the first episode we see James Holden, the Executive Officer of The Canterbury, and a small crew launch off their main ship on a small craft to investigate a distress signal. Shortly after discovering that the signal was likely designed to get their main ship to stop its path – a cloaked ship destroys the Canterbury.

A number of Don Quixote’s adventures consist of him misinterpreting circumstances around him for situations that require him to intervene. These interventions, however, don’t actually assist those that he imagines in need of help and result in him getting hurt.
Now, I don’t believe that Holden is a variant or new incarnation of Quixote. From what we know of his character he’s not obsessed with knight-errantry or some other sort of fiction. However, following the death of his crewmates on the Canterbury which he blames himself for, he does seem to gain greater moral agency by uncovering and revealing the REAL truth about the Canterbury – which he is not yet aware of.

The viral spread of Holden’s video denouncing the Martians mirrors the publication of Don Quixote part II in Don Quixote Part II

In book two of Don Quixote, the eponymous character learns that the tales of his adventures have been published and he meets many people that are aware of who he is. Quixote does not mind this, but he does take qualm upon learning that a sequel, published by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, is also available for purchase at booksellers stalls and that it contains many falsehoods. Don Quixote criticizes this False Quixote and even adjusts some of his behaviors so as to not be mistaken for the fake one.
Holden’s transmits a video denouncing the Martians for their purported blowing up of the Canterbury. This video makes him known far and wide. Upon encountering Martian consumers of the material, however, this fame is turned into infamy. He later realizes that they are not the one responsible and thus tries to correct the false image of him that exists in people’s minds.

Episode 7, titled Windmills, features a copy of Cervantes’ Quixote that is the brief subject of conversation between Holden’s mother and Avasarala

That’s mostly it in the headline. The only additional comment worth making is how it is that here we learn that Holden doesn’t, according to his mother, recognize Don Quixote as a tragedy. While I’d argue that Don Quixote isn’t tragedy – though it does has elements of it – it’s interesting that this comment is made to provide insight into Holden’s character.

The Geographic relationship between the Outer Belt and the Core Planets mirrors that of Spain and the Colonies

Placing the two maps side by side ought to suffice to illustrate this point.

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However I think that it’s worth reinforcing this point through the below one.

The Economic relationship between the Outer Belt and the Core Planets mirrors that of Spain and it’s Colonies

The Outer Planets exist in a relationship to Earth of complete economic dependence. Air and the technologies needed to survive are scarce. Belters lives on the physical and technical periphery of interplanetary trade. It is a large part of the reason that they have organized themselves into economic/political alliance. Why? Because resource extraction seems to be the primary economic activity and thus they are for the most part the suzerain partner to the much larger state. The Belt clearly demonstrates the qualities of a periphery as described in a historical context in Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s Dependency and Development in Latin America and Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World Systems series.
While there are numerous allusions to this dynamic within the conversations of the characters I could quote, I found the graphic depiction of this relationship as illustrated following the capture of an OPA smuggler by United Nations forces to be particularly compelling.Chrisjen Avasarala, a powerful UN executive, submits the smuggler to gravity torture. His body is so distorted that literally can’t even stand up on his own – thus drastically limiting the possibilities for occupational development elsewhere. This is the curse of many a export economy, which is unable to develop a middle class due to underdevelopment.

The OPA Symbol is the IWA Symbol

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The International Workers Association, also called the First Internationale, was an umbrella group for Anarchist and Socialist groups organizing in Europe founded in 1864. It was internationalist in orientation, but split into two main factions that disagreed whether or not to engage in parliamentary struggle or not. The faction supporting Mikhail Bakunin – the wing that rejected such struggles and which would later advocate for propaganda by the deed in the form of bombings and assassinations found it’s most numerous and vibrant following in Spain.

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I don’t mean by the above to put forward an argument that claims that Iberian History and Culture are as influential to The Expanse as Game of Thrones is to the War of the Roses – as shown below – but merely to shows some interesting overlaps that I noticed with an area of my study.