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600 and Moore
by RON SCOTT
detnews.com, Oct 29, 2009

It’s always been difficult for me to do obituaries and talk about the people whose lives have been so spirited, strident and strong in the past tense. Dave Moore is one of those people. He passed away today at the age of 97.

Maybe you’ve never heard of him. But you’ve certainly heard of that which he helped make possible for everyone who works in America.

After escaping a lynching in South Carolina in the 1920s, Dave Moore moved to Detroit and participated in the 1930 hunger strike 1930 hunger strike, in which several members of a group of displaced workers marched on the Ford Rouge plant to demand jobs and food. Several of them were killed, and to this day no one has been charged.

Dave Moore, who was the last hunger marcher, cried last year when I interviewed him as part of an oral history project for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. He cried for those individuals who were long dead, but whose martyrdom he helped give spirit to as a union-builder at what was to become UAW Local 600 at the Rouge Plant. Local 600 would, at its height, go on to become the largest local in America.

Moore worked at Ford Motor Company during the 1930s, like most African Americans, in the foundry, inhaling soot and blowing black residue out of his lungs at the end of the day. He joined such notables as Coleman A. Young, Quill Pettway, Lebron Simmons and Rev. Charles Hill in a fight to push the UAW to include African Americans on equal terms with their white brothers. In those tough days just before 1940, Henry Ford I had said that he would not allow his company to be unionized, against the best counsel of his son Edsel.

The historic “Battle of the Overpass” saw former UAW President Walter Reuther and several others were thrown over the bridge which arcs from one side of Miller Road in Dearborn to the Ford plant and onto hard concrete pavement. Dave Moore and other African Americans had been left out of the organizing because many of their white colleagues did not believe they should get equal pay for equal work. Black people, who had flocked to Detroit during the early $5-a-day offer, felt a sense of loyalty to the old entrepreneur. The same workers also desired better pay and safer conditions than the current conditions where they were nearly consumed daily by a blast furnace.

As the UAW moved to strike Ford Motor Company, Black workers locked themselves in the plant and were reviled as “strike breakers.” Moore, Young and others saw there an opportunity to unify Black and White workers in what otherwise would have been a failing effort. Rev. Charles Hill, Dave Moore and several other organizers called upon the great Paul Robeson to come and sing to Black workers in order to encourage them to come out of the plant and join the strike.

The rest is history. Black workers joined White workers in the streets outside of Ford Rouge and turned the tide of battle, thus making UAW Local 600 the pivotal win for the UAW in its battle with the auto company. Without Local 600, the UAW would never have become the union it became. And arguably, the labor movement would not have been as strong.

Dave Moore was truly an outstanding member of the Detroit community. Over the next 50 years, he worked as a labor leader who was ultimately pushed out of the union he helped to found after he was called a Communist by the union leadership. He and Coleman Young faced the venom of Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s, and Moore was subsequently exonerated and returned to his union position. He later worked for Congressman George Crockett and Mayor Young.

A man of Moore’s stature is not defined by the jobs he won or lost, or by his setbacks so common to those we call warriors. What is important in his life epic, when many ferociously attack unions, question their relevance and diminish many of the hard-won benefits that we all share, Dave Moore’s legacy reminds us that there are still things that we must fight for.

Speaking as an honoree at the National Lawyers Guild two years ago, Dave Moore reminded the throng of lawyers, legal workers and union members that it’s not about looking back to past fights, but understanding how the past will help us fight for the future. Because those in power never relinquish anything without a struggle.

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Afghanistan: Heads You Lose, Tails You Lose
by Immanuel Wallerstein
Agence Global, Nov 1, 2009

The war in Afghanistan is a war in which whatever the United States does now, or that President Obama does now, both the United States and Obama will lose. The country and its president are in a situation of perfect lockjaw.

Consider the basic situation. The Afghan government in Kabul has no legitimacy with the majority of the Afghan people. It also has no army worthy of the name. It also has no financial base. There is almost no military or personal security anywhere. It is faced with a guerilla opposition, the Taliban, who control half the country and who have grown steadily stronger since the Taliban government was overthrown by a foreign (largely United States) invasion in 2002. The New York Times reports that the Taliban “are running a sophisticated financial network to pay for their insurgent operations,” which American officials are struggling, unsuccessfully, to cut off.

Pres. Hamid Karzai was reelected recently in a manifestly falsified election. The U.S. government was ready to swallow this because Karzai is the only major politician who is ethnically a Pashtun, the base of the Taliban support. He is therefore the only one who can even hope to enter into a political arrangement with some or all of the Taliban. The United States was embarrassed publicly into recognizing the electoral fraud and was pressured to put pressure on Karzai to accept a run-off second round election. Karzai will undoubtedly win the run-off. His political position, post-election, will be very weak.

The major U.S. political ally in the region, Pakistan, is clearly collusive with the Taliban — in large part to ensure its own internal survival. The U.S. military commander, General Stanley McChrystal, insists he needs 40,000 more troops right away, or it will be too late to win the war in Afghanistan. It seems unlikely he will get the full number of these troops, or fast enough, to meet his implicit deadline. There are many military figures who doubt that he is right in arguing that his 40,000 more troops, even if they arrive right away, will make the difference.

It doesn’t seem very daring to suggest that the United States will have to withdraw from Afghanistan at some point. Who will really come to power in Afghanistan at that point is a very open question. There may well be civil war for a long time.

Within the United States, opinion about the ‘lost’ war will be extremely divided. It seems clear that the Republican right is preparing the charge of a treacherous sell-out by the Democrats in general, and Obama in particular. Gen. McChrystal may well be their candidate for president, if not in 2012 then in 2016.

Obama will get no credit for anything he does. If he gives full backing immediately to McChrystal’s requests, he will still be accused by the Republicans of having done it too late. At the same time, he will have angered deeply at least half, if not more, of those who voted for him in 2008.

The war in Afghanistan has become Obama’s war. When the United States ‘loses’ that war, it will be Obama who will be charged with having ‘lost’ it. Even if he gets a health bill of some kind passed (possible), and even if the U.S. and world economic situation improves in the next several years (doubtful), the war in Afghanistan will still loom largest as the single most important element in judging his presidency.

Could Obama reverse this situation by moving dramatically in another direction — towards a rapid political deal with the Taliban and full withdrawal? Aside from the fact that there is no public evidence that he is seriously contemplating doing this, there is not yet the degree of public support within the United States to make this a feasible political option for him. He doesn’t even have the necessary degree of support within his own administration for such a dramatic shift.

So the United States and Obama shall stumble on, for a year or two, while the general military and political situation deteriorates. For the United States and for Obama, it is heads we lose, tails we lose.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

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NO SAFE PASSAGE: Little Rock to Chicago
by Bernardine Dohrn
Huffington Post, October 7, 2009

Last week, the heartbreaking beating death of 16-year-old Chicago student Derrion Albert was captured on video, unleashing a fresh wave of sorrow on the South Side, another layer of fear and terror among students and families in the community, and — painfully, the predictable calls from authorities for more harsh treatment of youth — that is, some youth.

Indeed, the videotape shows other youngsters, ages 16, 17, 18 and 19, carrying out the tragic, terrible and fatal attack on Derrion. But what else do we need to ask? What more do we want to know?

First, the nearby school, Fenger Academy, is a newly reconstituted “Turnaround” school. Carver High School was closed by the Chicago Board of Education, and long-time teachers and staff fired, radically destabilizing already challenged communities and pushing students out and across gang territory into unfamiliar settings. Two schools, Fenger Academy and Carver Military School were created with new teachers and staff for the 2009-2010 school year. This made little sense to the community or to the youth from Altgeld Gardens housing development, who now are assigned to Fenger rather than Carver. The students were not consulted about their safety or their school preference.

Second, there were numerous requests to police and school officials from the families, teachers and community members for safe passage community protection between home and school for students (and teachers). Remember the eight extraordinary students from Central High School in Little Rock who ultimately required the presence of their own mobilized community, the world media, and U.S. troops for their safe passage into the school they finally integrated over 50 years ago? Where was Derrion’s safe passage?

Third, it is an adult problem that our children attempt to attend school in a war zone in certain areas of Chicago — a citizen problem, systemic and societal. One hundred sixty-three children were killed in the past two years in Chicago and more than double that number wounded. By the end of September of this school year, three children have already been killed and seven more shot. These are war numbers.

It is adults and adult society who have failed Roseland’s children by tolerating these chronic conditions in our city. In the mid-1990s, Roseland was the notorious home of 11-year-old Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, the tiny youngster alleged to have killed and then was himself killed. Were this in Colombia, the Congo or Myanmar, we would recognize that children who are recruited into warring groups by much older adults to fight as child soldiers must be disarmed, demobilized, rehabilitated and reintegrated into the community. Human rights holds those adult leaders responsible as war criminals for the recruitment, arming, training, and deployment of children turned into instruments of violence. Here, we deem these youthful pawns as irredeemable and condemn them to adult prosecution and long-term incarceration.

Fourth, when a disastrous school murder or even just a tragic accidental death of a student occurs in white suburban neighborhoods of Chicago, the community is flooded with experts to address and reduce trauma. These health and clergy professionals work with students, teachers, parents, and administrators as part of an extended public health process. Of course Roseland has its own expertise and wisdom in survival and coping with tragedy. But where are the equivalent official resources and trauma response of caring and compassion for those in this African-American community? What do the kindergarten children make of this?
Our tax dollars, more than one trillion per year, purportedly are going to make areas free from violence across the globe. Certainly we can provide our children here with basic safety, equal education, and solidarity.

So let’s ask where we went wrong, each time we assert how these youth went wrong. And let’s hold the authorities to the same harsh standards they apply to our adolescents.

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Excerpt:

I was recently sitting at the bar of Le Petit Zinc talking to the owner, Charles Sorel, when he said something I found shocking: “I can’t imagine opening a business anywhere but Detroit.”

From a local, I would have just written it off as city pride, but Charles is, as he himself puts it, a citizen of the world. Born in the French Caribbean and reared in Paris, he ran a French joint in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene and lived in Brazil before winding up here. When I pointed out the risks of starting up in a city as troubled as Detroit, he shrugged it off. “When I moved to New York in the late ’80s there was not a day when someone in the city wasn’t robbed or beaten or killed,” he said. “This is so much better than that.”

A year ago, Charles opened Le Petit Zinc with the simple belief that there was a market here for a crêperie and cafe that served fresh organic food at a decent price. But that was certainly no guarantee of success. Not only was the economy cratering, but the building itself, an abandoned day care center tucked between a working-class Irish neighborhood called Corktown and a few abandoned warehouses, was on a street with no foot traffic. The only thing the place had going for it was a rundown playground out back that was good for outdoor seating. For the first five weeks after opening, when he was the cook, waiter, busboy and janitor, he had no idea what to expect.

Now, we are all raised to think of business as a sort of vicious spy-versus-spy, cutthroat activity where every competing establishment is out to stick a shiv into the other. You’d think that this kind of blood thirst would be even worse in Detroit, which — with Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, Eminem’s lyrics and our old, quaint Devil’s Night tradition of burning down houses — has acquired a certain reputation for toughness. But Charles discovered that the neighboring Detroit restaurants actually had quite a different reaction to a new competitor.

Read the full article at NYTimes.com.

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