Blows Against the Empire—2020 In Memoriam

By Steve Lalla

To say that 2020 has been memorable would be an understatement, but experience teaches us that our memories of the pandemic may well be struck from the record.

“The 1918 influenza epidemic is one of history’s great conundrums, obliterated from the consciousness of historians,” wrote Gina Kolata, and COVID-19 may yet meet the same fate.[1] Kolata recalls that not only was the Spanish flu omitted from basic history in her elementary and high school, but was also ignored in microbiology and virology courses in college, even though it killed more people than the first world war.

From the onset of the pandemic it was clear that it would accelerate the crumble of the u.s empire. Many had commented on the fragility of neoliberalism in the face of public health crises, and it was pretty obvious from the start that the imperialist system would prove incapable of handling COVID-19 in a reasonable manner.

While the u.s and its capitalist vassals fell prey to COVID-19, blaming it on China or insisting that “one day, like a miracle, it will disappear,” the pandemic overshadowed imperialist defeats in the Middle East and Latin America, and masked some of the scariest climate catastrophes in recorded history.

A chronology of 2020’s most salient dates:

January 5: Iraq’s parliament voted to expel all u.s troops from the country. Deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Units of Iraq, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, was assassinated in a January 3 drone strike—in addition to Iran’s General Soleimani—the last straw for Iraq politicians’ toleration of any u.s troops on their soil. About 5,000 u.s troops remain in the country. The ruling was the final blow to Bush Jr.’s lie that the Iraq War would “bring freedom” to Iraqis, who instead revile the u.s for killing a million of their brothers and sisters, destroying their economy and infrastructure, and bombing their most precious ancient sites.

January 6: Millions filled the streets of Tehran, Iran, following the drone killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani. Widely publicized footage of astounding mourning processions contradicted u.s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s hollow boasts: “We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom, freedom to have the opportunity for success and prosperity for their nations. While the political leadership may not want that, the people in these nations will demand it.” Coupled with the late-2019 u.s retreat in Syria, it became clear that the empire was losing their war against the Shia Crescent.

January-February: Early in the new year raging forest fires in Australia grabbed world attention. Fires incinerated over 45 million acres and caused almost 500 deaths, either directly or as a result of smoke inhalation. Ecologists estimated that over one billion mammals, birds and reptiles were killed, including about eight thousand koalas. Climate change and destruction of the environment, spurred by decades of conspicuous consumption and a dependence on fossil fuels, are the results of an anarchic capitalist economic system that profits from waste and obsolescence. The u.s produces over 30 percent of the planet’s waste but holds about 4 percent of world population, a profligate lifestyle they imagine can be exported globally.   

March 10: China announces victory in the struggle against the COVID-19 virus. To date, they’ve reported one death and a handful of cases since mid-April. Following strong measures to combat the pandemic including mandatory lockdowns and mask use, antibacterial dousing of public spaces, contact tracing, and regulating travel, China emerged as the global leader in pandemic defense. As a result China represents the one significant national economy that didn’t slump in 2020 and the world’s “only major growth engine,” according to Bloomberg. They dealt an additional blow to imperialism by sending doctors and equipment to the rescue of NATO countries, notably Italy, France, and Spain, or to stalwart u.s allies such as Brazil, Indonesia or the Philippines, in addition to helping numerous resistance nations including Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and African nations such as Algeria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, or Zimbabwe.

April 6: Prominent right-wing political figures and news sources shared the story that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had died of COVID-19. In reality Nicaragua had recorded only one death. Camera-shy Ortega made a rare televised speech on April 15th denouncing the u.s empire for spending trillions of dollars on bombs and war but refusing to provide basic free health care for their people. By December, the u.s death rate for COVID-19 was 40 times that of Nicaragua. 

April 20: A blitz of news regarding the death of Kim Jong-un filled all mainstream media. With the pandemic claiming lives around the world this story became huge. Unsurprisingly the lie originated with media funded by the u.s regime-change operation National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

May 3: Venezuelan fishermen foiled the Operation Gideon armed invasion led by former green berets employed by private security company Silvercorp. In March trump placed a $15 million bounty on Maduro, with predictable results. Following the arrest and confession of Silvercorp founder Jordan Goudreau, we learned that u.s officials and their Venezuelan puppets juan guaidó and leopoldo lópez planned and funded the attack. Goudreau even presented documents to prove it. Eight mercenaries were killed, seventeen were captured. The photo of prostrate commandos in front of the Casa of Socialist Fishermen was cited as one of the year’s best.

May 24: Anti-imperialist nations, locked out of world markets by u.s sanctions, were starting to team up. On this day Iranian oil tankers, escorted by boats, helicopters and planes of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) of Venezuela, broke the blockade and landed in El Palito.

May 25: The public lynching of George Floyd horrified the world. In the middle of the street, in broad daylight, while being filmed, a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes, until Floyd breathed no more. One of over 1,000 murders by u.s police in 2020, Floyd’s killing sparked massive spontaneous protests across the u.s in every city and town. Widespread arson and looting occurred and an army of live streamers shared daily demos, speeches, and police brutality, for those at home. The protests raged for months and had many peaks. The empire deployed the National Guard, military helicopters, and by July were using unidentified troops in black vans to kidnap protesters. At least 14,000 civilians were arrested, and 19 killed, in the protests.

May 28: Protestors torched the Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct police headquarters, where George Floyd’s killer worked. Police forces had fled the building. The incendiary images provided some of the year’s most widely shared and beloved photographs.

May 31: u.s president trump was taken to a fortified bunker as thousands of protestors besieged the White House and threatened his life. Eventually the empire’s security forces established a perimeter around the president’s residence, with multiple layers of fencing, and fought a pitched battle with bottle-throwing protestors for weeks on end.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/trump-bunker-george-floyd-protests

June 3: Cristobal makes landfall in Louisiana, the first of a record-breaking five named storms to hit the state in 2020. Lake Charles, a city that held almost 80,000 people, immortalized in The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek,” will never recover. Over 45,000 homes were damaged, insured losses topped $10 billion, and thousands of residents are still displaced.

June 20: After tweeting that “almost one million people requested tickets for the Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!" trump spoke to only 6,000 supporters and over 13,000 empty seats. He was trolled by K-Pop fans and teens on Tik Tok who had bought up all the tickets and created fake hype around the event. Photos of a dejected trump leaving the rally were wildly popular.

August 19: Out-of-control California wildfires began to gain international media attention. By this day over 350 fires were already burning. The state went on to record over nine thousand fires, burning about 4 percent of the state’s land, by far the worst wildfire season in California’s history. The smoke from the fires, which are still burning, will create a miniature nuclear winter, contributing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the cars, cities and industries in the u.s during an entire year, and release energy equivalent to “hundreds of hydrogen bombs.”

October 6: Enormous protests erupted across Indonesia in the wake of the government’s passing of an Omnibus Law that undermines workers’ rights and the environment. The law was enacted November 3; protests are ongoing and have resulted in the arrest of at least six thousand civilians including 18 journalists.

October 13: In recognition of their success in maintaining the “highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights,” both Cuba and China were elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

October 18: Luis Arce, candidate of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), swept into power by trouncing Carlos Mesa in Bolivia’s presidential election, gaining 55 percent of the vote to Mesa’s 28 percent. The results put the lie to claims by u.s-backed Organization of American States (OAS) that the 2019 elections, in which Evo Morales was elected to a new term, were fraudulent. Arce’s election vindicated those who had argued for a year that Morales was deposed in an illegitimate, u.s-sponsored coup. Coup dictator jeanine añez and her coterie of imperialist supporters were panned worldwide. añez was captured trying to flee the country while other offending politicians, such as Minister of the Interior arturo murillo, and Minister of Defense fernando lopez, escaped.

October 25: In response to gigantic demonstrations that began in October, 2019 and still haven’t let up, Chile held a Constitutional Referendum. The main objectives of the ongoing protest movement are the removal of president piñera and of the pinochet Constitution that made Chile “ground zero” for the failed neoliberal experiment. To date over 2,500 Chileans have been injured, almost three thousand arrested, and 29 killed in the protests. In the October 25 referendum 80 percent voted for a new constitution, and chose to have it drafted by a Constituent Assembly elected by the people.

November 3: trump’s loss in the u.s presidential elections wasn’t really a defeat for imperialism because biden’s regime will prove to be just as bad, or worse,  for targets of the empire.

Nevertheless, it felt like a victory for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because trump embodied outright neo-fascism and was supported by the most reactionary, racist yankees. Secondly, because, following his electoral defeat, trump and his entourage resorted to every possible ruse that CIA regime-change operations have employed in other countries for decades: crying fraud, attacking voting centers, and denouncing imaginary communists. “trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other u.s leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf. “The latest example was him calling the u.s elections a fraud. With that he made it impossible to undermine the elections in Venezuela.”

November 11: Evo Morales returned to Bolivia exactly one year to the day after his ouster. His return was celebrated by multitudes, and hailed as a “world historic event.” Morales assumed his place as head of MAS and as an eminent spokesperson against imperialism.

November 23: While u.s reported their largest increase in poverty since they began tracking data, China announced that they had lifted all counties out of poverty, and eradicated extreme poverty across the Republic. Since 1978 China has lifted over 850 million out of poverty, according to the World Bank.

November 25: Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla revealed links between members of the San Isidro movement and the u.s embassy in Havana. The failed San Isidro campaign revolved around Cuban rapper Denis Solis, detained in Havana for failing to respect COVID-19 regulations and assaulting a police officer. A small group went on a highly publicized "hunger strike" demanding his release and claiming that Cuba was repressing dissent. Meanwhile Cuba's government and investigative journalists revealed the ties, including funding and numerous meetings, between San Isidro group members, Miami-based right-wing agitators and u.s politicians in Cuba. The rapper in question, Denis Solis, didn't help his case by yelling "trump 2020!" at Cuban police officers in a video he filmed and shared himself a few days after trump had lost the election.

November 26: Over 250 million took to the streets in India, reported as the “biggest organized strike in human history,” protesting new laws that will attack farm workers and subject the nation to inequitable neoliberal doctrines. Huge masses of demonstrators marched on Delhi from neighboring states. They met barricades, roadblocks, armed security forces, teargas and all manner of obstructions, but dismantled everything and reached their target. "They are trying to give away agriculture to capitalists, just like they sold so many of our important public sector companies across India," said a spokesperson. "Through this relentless privatization they want to further exploit farmers and workers."

December 6: Venezuela’s Parliamentary Election resulted in a landslide victory for Maduro’s Chavista party PSUV/GPP, breaking a deadlock in Parliament that had lasted for five years, and ushering in a new era in Venezuelan politics that will last until the end of Maduro’s term in 2024—barring a military invasion, assassination or successful coup by imperialist powers.

The upcoming year certainly holds more of the same in store for us: embarrassments for imperialism, hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths, and a doubling-down on capitalism’s claims that it provides the only way forward, evidenced by the hubris of promotional efforts for The Great Reset.

Notes

[1] Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Gig Companies Buy Immunity From Labor Protections

(PHOTO CREDIT: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

By Bri Jackson

Republished from Michigan Specter.

While the whole country was wrapped up in a contentious presidential election, gig companies in California were biding their time. Corporations like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Postmates spent $200 million advertising in favor of the highly damaging California ballot measure known as Proposition 22, which would categorize gig workers as independent contractors. The classification exempts these corporate behemoths from giving their workers the benefits entitled to company employees such as a minimum wage, health insurance, and sick pay.

The proposition spits in the face of hard-won labor protections that have existed in the United States for decades. In fact, the California Supreme Court had previously upheld Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), enacted on January 1st of this year, which sought to protect gig workers and classify them as full employees. Despite the overwhelming harm to California workers if the legislation were reversed, voters passed Proposition 22 with a strong majority of 58%. With the passage of Prop 22, corporate greed has bought out the opinions, and votes, of Californians and stripped rights from workers who desperately need them.

If you’re asking “Why??” and slapping your forehead, you are not alone. Let’s quickly examine the history of gig legislation this year in California to understand. AB 5 protected workers by instituting a three-point framework to classify any worker as an independent contractor: the worker must have control over how they work, they must be free to seek work elsewhere, and their labor cannot be central to the company’s business. A major win for workers and labor unions, the bill helped to categorize gig workers as employees entitled to the same benefits as other workers.

As expected, AB 5 was promptly vilified by gig companies who immediately began searching for a way to overturn the legislation that was hurting their bottom line. Uber and Lyft argued that one of the main benefits of working for them was drivers’ flexibility to make their own schedule, but that AB 5 would force the companies to schedule drivers and reduce their total workforce to remain profitable. The ride-sharing companies also claimed that workers have significant control over how they work because of the scheduling flexibility. But, as is the case with so many of their claims, it is a farce. In fact, Uber sets drivers’ base fares, assigns drivers specific routes, and fires drivers by “deactivating” their accounts for inactivity or for receiving low passenger ratings. In reality, it seems drivers have little control over what they charge as well as when and where they work.

In response to AB 5, Uber and Lyft immediately took to advertising for a counter-legislation through ballot proposal. And, thus, Prop 22 was born. In spite of the obvious consequences of not providing basic labor protections to workers, voters went to the polls and cast their ballots to counter the basic rights of their fellow Californians anyway.

The passage of Proposition 22 was the result of a ceaseless campaign by gig companies to manipulate voters and convince workers that the measure would benefit them. During the campaign, Uber and Lyft maintained that, under the proposal, they would be providing their workers with a minimum wage and a healthcare stipend to offset the cost of having to buy their own health insurance. Yet again, the gig companies have intentionally misrepresented the realities of enacting the proposal. Prop 22 avoids guaranteeing independent contractors a minimum wage by modifying the activities that count as “worked” time, lowering actual wages from $12 an hour to an estimated $5.64. In addition, the healthcare stipend is estimated to be a paltry $30 per pay-period — hardly a drop in the bucket.

All of these negative effects on workers are made worse in the current moment during the full throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. As ride demand goes down due to safety restrictions, gig workers are offered no protections to help them navigate the hardships caused by loss of income. In addition to this, people of color, who are already the most socially vulnerable group during this pandemic, constitute a majority of drivers. The result of Prop 22 in such an unprecedented moment is to make vulnerable workers significantly more vulnerable in a time of desperate need. Despite the companies’ claims of wanting to help workers, their actions speak louder than their words.

How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning Planet

By James Plested

Originally published at Red Flag News. Republished from Monthly Review.

The climate crisis isn’t a future we must fight to avoid. It’s an already unfolding reality. It’s the intensification of extreme weather–cyclones, storms and floods, droughts and deadly heat waves. It’s burning forests in Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia, Siberia, Canada and California. It’s melting ice caps, receding glaciers and rising seas. It’s ecosystem devastation and crop failures. It’s the scarcity of resources spreading hunger and thirst. It’s lives and communities destroyed, and millions forced to flee.

This crisis is escalating at a terrifying rate. Every year, new temperature records are set. Every day, new disasters are reported. In Australia, we’re living through a summer of dust and fire. Hot winds from the desert are sweeping up dirt from the parched landscape and covering towns and cities hundreds and thousands of kilometres away. Creeks and riverbeds are being baked dry. Our cities are shrouded in smoke from fires burning for weeks on end, while on the hottest and windiest days the flames grow, devouring everything in their path.

Do our rulers–the political leaders and corporate elites who, behind the facade of democracy, make all the important decisions about what happens in our society–understand the danger we face? On the surface they appear unconcerned. In September, after millions of school students participated in the global climate strike and Greta Thunberg gave her “How dare you!” speech at the United Nations, prime minister Scott Morrison responded by cautioning “against raising the anxieties of children”. And when, in November, hundreds of homes were destroyed and four people killed by bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland, he told the ABC there was “no evidence” that Australia’s emissions had any role in it and that “we’re doing our bit” to tackle climate change.

Is Morrison stupid? Somewhere along the line it appears his words have become unmoored from reality, and are now simply free-floating signifiers, spinning out of control in a void of unreason. As the empirical evidence of the devastation being caused by climate change in Australia and around the world mounts, so too does the gulf between this reality and the rhetoric of conservative coal-fondlers like Morrison grow into a seemingly unbridgeable chasm.

But something is wrong with this picture. To believe that someone in Morrison’s position could genuinely be ignorant of the dangers of climate change is itself to give up on reason. The prime minister of Australia is among the most well-briefed people on the planet, with thousands of staff at his beck and call to update him on the latest developments in climate science or any other field he may wish to get his head around.The only rational explanation is that Morrison and his like are aware of the dangers posed by climate change but are choosing to act as though they’re not.

On first appearances, this might seem like a fundamentally irrational standpoint. It would be more accurate, however, to describe it as evil.Morrison is smart enough to see that any genuine effort to tackle the climate crisis would involve a challenge to the system of free market capitalism that he has made his life’s mission to serve. And he has chosen to defend the system. Morrison and others among the global political and business elite have made a choice to build a future in which capitalism survives, even if it brings destruction on an unimaginable scale.

They are like angels of death, happy to watch the world burn, and millions burn with it, if they can preserve for themselves the heavenly realm of a system that has brought them untold riches. This is language that Morrison, an evangelical Christian, should understand. What might be harder for him to grasp is that he’s on the wrong side.

When seen from this perspective, everything becomes clearer. In the face of the climate crisis, the main priority of the global ruling class and its political servants is to batten down the hatches. Publicly, they’re telling school kids not to worry about the future. Behind the scenes, however–in the cabinet offices, boardrooms, mansions and military high commands–they’re hard at work, planning for a future in which they can maintain their power and privilege amid the chaos and destruction of the burning world around them.

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We’re not, as some in the environment movement argue, “all in this together”. There are many ways in which the wealthy minority at the top of society are already protected from the worst climate change impacts. Big corporations can afford to spend millions on mitigating climate change risks–ensuring their assets are protected so they can keep their business running even during a major disaster. Businesses and wealthy individuals can also protect themselves by taking out insurance policies that will pay out if their property is damaged in a flood, fire or other climate-related disaster.

The rich are also protected from climate change on a more day to day level. They tend to live in the leafiest suburbs, in large, climate-controlled houses. They have shorter commutes to work, where, again, they’re most often to be found in the most comfortable, air-conditioned buildings. They’re not the ones working on farms or construction sites, in factories or warehouses–struggling with the increasing frequency of summer heatwaves. They’re not the ones living in houses with no air conditioning, sweating their way through stifling summer nights. They have pools and manicured lawns and can afford their own large water tanks to keep their gardens green in the hot, dry summer months.

What about in the most extreme scenarios, where what we might call the “natural defences” enjoyed by the wealthy are bound to fail? What happens when the firestorms bear down on their country retreats or rising seas threaten their beach houses? Money, it turns out, goes a long way. In November 2018, for instance, when large areas of California were engulfed in flames, and more than 100 people burned to death, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired their own private firefighting crew to save their US$50 million Calabasas mansion.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city’s wealthiest residents evacuated well in advance and hired a private army of security guards from companies such as Blackwater to protect their homes and possessions from the mass of poor, mainly Black residents who were left behind. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill went to the city in the aftermath of the hurricane and witnessed first-hand the highly militarised and racialised nature of the response. One security contractor, hired by a local businessman, told Scahill his team had been fired on by “Black gangbangers”, in response to which the contractors “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters … ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said’”.

In the event of disaster, the response of the rich hasn’t been to work with others to ensure the collective security of all those affected. It has been to use all resources at their disposal to protect themselves and their property. And increasingly, as in New Orleans, this protection has come in the form of armed violence directed at those less well off–people whose desperation, they fear, could turn them into a threat.

The most forward thinking of the super-rich are aware that we’re heading toward a future of ecological and social break-down. And they’re keen to keep ahead of the curve by investing today in the things they’ll need to survive. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, media theorist and futurist Douglas Rushkoff related his experience of being paid half his annual salary to speak at “a super-deluxe private resort … on the subject of ‘the future of technology’”. He was expecting a room full of investment bankers. When he arrived, however, he was introduced to “five super-wealthy guys … from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world”. Rushkoff wrote:

After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own … Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? … Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?’

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down … They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for survival.

There’s a reason these conversations go on only behind closed doors. If your plan is to allow the world to spiral towards mass death and destruction while you retreat to a bunker in the south island of New Zealand or some other isolated area to live out your days in comfort, protected by armed guards whose loyalty you maintain by threat of death, you’re unlikely to win much in the way of public support. Better to keep the militarised bunker thing on the low-down and keep people thinking that “we’re all in this together” and if we just install solar panels, recycle more, ride to work and so on we’ll somehow turn it all around and march arm in arm towards a happy and sustainable future.

The rich don’t have to depend only on themselves. Their most powerful, and well-armed, protector is the capitalist state, which they can rely on to advance their interests even when those may conflict with the imperative to preserve some semblance of civilisation. This is where people like Morrison come in. They’re the ones who have been delegated the task, as Karl Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, of “managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. In the context of climate change, this means taking the steps necessary to ensure the continued ability of the capitalist class to profit even if the world may be unravelling into ecological breakdown and social chaos.

There are three main ways in which Australia and other world powers are working toward this. First, they’re building their military might–spending billions of dollars on ensuring they have the best means of destruction at their disposal to help project their power in an increasingly unstable world. Second, they’re building walls and brutal detention regimes to make sure borders can be crossed only by those deemed necessary to the requirements of profit making. Third, they’re enhancing their repressive apparatus by passing anti-protest laws and expanding and granting new powers to the police and security agencies to help crush dissent at home.

Military strategists have been awake to the implications of climate change for a long time. As early as 2003, in a report commissioned by the Pentagon, U.S. researchers Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall argued that “violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food, and water rather than conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor. The shifting motivation for confrontation would alter which countries are most vulnerable and the existing warning signs of security threats”.

More recently, a 2015 U.S. Department of Defense memorandum to Congress argued: “Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time”.

The Australian military has also been preparing for an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment driven in part by the impact of climate change. The 2009 Defence White Paper included a section, “New Security Concerns: Climate Change and Resource Scarcity”, which pointed to the vulnerabilities of many countries in our region. The paper was explicit in linking these to a possible increase in “threats inimical to our interests” and suggested that military capabilities would need to be strengthened accordingly. A 2018 Senate inquiry into the implications of climate change for “national security” drew similar conclusions.

Although discussions about military preparedness are often pitched in terms of the need for increased development assistance, disaster relief and so on, the practice of the U.S., Australian and other military powers over the past few decades leaves little room for doubt as to what their role will be. When they’re not invading countries on the other side of the world–killing hundreds of thousands, reducing cities to rubble and imprisoning and torturing anyone who opposes them–to secure access to fossil fuels, they’re acting as the enforcers of capitalist interests closer to home.

The response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is again a good example. When troops from the U.S. National Guard joined the army of private contractors sent to establish “security” amid the death and destruction of the hurricane’s aftermath, the Army Times described their role as quashing “the insurgency in the city”. The paper quoted brigadier general Gary Jones as saying, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control”. A similar dynamic was at work in Australia when, in 2007, the Howard government sent troops to establish “order” in remote Indigenous communities as part of the racist Northern Territory Intervention.

The idea that the military could be a force for good in the context of environmental catastrophe and social breakdown is laughable. Whatever the rhetoric, the role of the military is to secure the interests of a nation’s capitalist class amid the competitive global scramble for resources and markets. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had it right when he argued in 1999: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist–McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”. The military are gangsters for capitalism. And in the future, they’re likely to double down on savagery.

The next way in which the world’s most powerful capitalist states are preparing for climate catastrophe is by massively increasing what’s euphemistically called “border security”. In 2019, Germany celebrated 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event supposedly ushering in a new age of freedom and democracy. In the decades since, however, European countries have built around 1,000 kilometres of new border walls and fences–six times the length of that hated symbol of totalitarianism in Berlin. Most have been constructed since 2015, when millions of Syrians were forced to flee and seek sanctuary in Europe amid a brutal civil war that was triggered in part, at least, by climate change.

A 2018 report by the World Bank, Groundswell–Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, found that just three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South-East Asia) could generate 143 million climate migrants by 2050. Australia’s immediate neighbourhood will be affected severely, with several Pacific island nations forecast to disappear completely under rising seas. Already, in response to the relatively small numbers of refugees who have managed to reach Australia by boat in the past few decades, the Australian government has established one of the world’s most barbarous detention regimes. Other governments are now following suit.

So far, the measures discussed have been those primarily directed outwards by states seeking to defend the interests of their capitalist class in the international sphere. This is in part designed to create an “us and them” mentality within the domestic population. In Australia, this has been a staple of both Labor and Liberal governments for decades–the idea that the outside world is dangerous, full of terrorists and other bad people whom we should trust the government to protect us from. In the context of growing global instability associated with climate change, we can expect governments everywhere to double down on these xenophobic scare campaigns.

This should be resisted at every step. Not only for the sake of those “others”–civilians in Afghanistan, refugees imprisoned on Manus Island and so on–whose lives the government is destroying in the name of our security. But also because the racist fear of the outsider promoted by our governments is designed in large part to draw our attention away from the increasingly direct and open war being waged against the “others” within.

In the years since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Western governments have expanded and strengthened the state’s repressive apparatus. Today we’re seeing, as many predicted, how the crackdown on basic freedoms carried out in the name of the “war on terror” has created a new normal in which anyone opposing the government’s agenda becomes a target. Environmental protesters, and anyone else standing up against the destructive neoliberal order, are now firmly in their sights.

In the U.S., the battle to halt the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline provides the most extreme example to date. In November 2016, the Native American blockade at Standing Rock was broken up by a police operation so heavily militarised that it looked like something out of the invasion of Iraq. In sub-zero temperatures, blockaders were attacked with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and concussion grenades. Hundreds were injured and many hospitalised. Two women who were involved in the blockade and who later vandalised the pipeline are now facing charges under which they could be jailed for up to 110 years.

In Australia, we’ve seen those protesting peacefully outside the International Resources and Mining Conference in Melbourne face an unusual level of police violence and mass arrests. In Queensland, the state Labor government has passed new laws targeting environmental activists. In early December, three members of Extinction Rebellion were jailed when a magistrate refused them bail–something without precedent for charges related to acts of non-violent civil disobedience.

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Perhaps nothing provides a better metaphor for the future our leaders are steering us towards than a picture, taken during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, of the New York city skyline shrouded in the darkness of a blackout–all except one building, which remained lit up like a Christmas tree. That building was the headquarters of global banking giant Goldman Sachs, where, protected by a mountain of sandbags and using a back-up generator, the company was able to keep the lights on and the profits flowing even while the city was inundated by a three-metre storm surge and hospitals, schools, the subway and most other services were forced to close.

If you imagine this picture as the world, and the Goldman Sachs building as the gilded realm inhabited by the world’s super-rich and the political class that serve them, all you’d need to add is some heavily armed guards around the building and you’d get a pretty good sense of what’s ahead.Our rulers’ apparent lack of concern about climate change is a ruse. They hope that, if they can just head off dissent for long enough, they will succeed in building this future, brick by brutal brick, and there will be nothing the rest of us can do about it.

We need to fight for something different: a system in which our economy isn’t just a destructive machine grinding up human and natural resources to create mega-profits for the rich. One in which the productive life of society is managed collectively by those who do all the work, and where decisions are made not in the interests of private profit, but in the interests of human need. We need socialism–and the fight for it is the great challenge of our generation. At stake is nothing less than the world itself.

...And (Quality) Education For All: A Case Study on Race, Poverty, and Education in America

By Milo Levine

Four years ago, when senior Tre'chaun Berkley first came to Tamalpais High School (Mill Valley, CA) from Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, he was nervous. "I felt that I wasn't ready. Coming from a class with 11 students to a class with 20 is something I had to get used to," he said. "On top of that, [I worried about] not knowing how to speak with the people in my class, because I don't speak as proper [as them], so they wouldn't probably understand me or they would make fun [of] the way I say something," he said. Berkley is not alone. Many students of color that come to "Tam" from Marin City experience societal and systemic hardships that disrupt their educational experience.

"The Academic Achievement Gap"

We live in Marin County: the 17th wealthiest county in the country, and also one of the most segregated.

This segregation manifests itself in what teachers and administrators call "the academic achievement gap." According to the Glossary of Education Reform, an achievement gap is "any significant and persistent disparity in academic performance or educational attainment between different groups of students, such as white students and minorities, or students from higher-income and lower-income households."

This problem is very much alive in the Tam community. "The achievement gap correlates to socioeconomic status, and it is a countywide, statewide, and nationwide issue," Sausalito Marin City School District (SMCSD) Board of Trustees President Joshua Barrow said. "This is not something new. It's been around for decades."

Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy (MLK) and charter school Willow Creek Academy (WCA) are both part of SMCSD. Mill Valley Middle School (MVMS) is part of the Mill Valley School District (MVSD). MLK and WCA teach students in grades K-8, while MVMS teaches students in grades 6-8. All three schools feed into Tam, and though they're within four miles of each other, they couldn't be more different.

The aforementioned schools differ significantly in statewide testing results. Student skill, knowledge, and achievement are largely measured by the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) scores. This test is given to students in grades 3-8 and 11. There is a large disparity in student performance when MLK and WCA are compared to MVMS. CAASPP determined that 77 percent of MVMS students are proficient in math, and 83 percent are proficient in English. In stark contrast, 25 percent of MLK students are proficient in math and 25 percent are proficient in English, well below the statewide average of 37 percent in math and 48 percent in English. WCA passed more students than the state's average in both math and English, at 43 percent and 50 percent, respectively.

CAASPP also reports that 82 percent of MLK students and 40 percent of WCA students are either African American or Hispanic. These two demographics perform the lowest in both math and English testing at Tamalpais High School. According to CAASPP, 31 percent of Hispanic students are proficient in math and 36 percent are proficient in English, while only 17 percent of black students are proficient in math and only 23 percent are proficient in English.

These results are heavily influenced by both race and poverty, given that white Tam students from low-income families also receive significantly lower test scores when compared to the general population, but higher test scores than students of color.

Only 3 percent of African American students attending WCA are proficient in math, and only 10 percent are proficient in English. Among low-income students, who make up 42 percent of WCA's population, 23 percent are proficient in math and 35 percent are proficient in English. At MLK, 17 percent of black students are proficient in math and 14 percent are proficient in English. While these statistics highlight SMCSD's shortcomings, they also show that there is a significant racial element to the achievement gap.

The principal of MLK, Dr. Chappelle Griffin, did not respond to multiple email requests for comment.

At Tam, multiple former MLK students said they felt under-served by the teachers at MLK. Freshman Tyrell Atkinson went to MLK from grades K-7, but transferred to WCA for the 8th grade. "I learned a lot in math and English [at MLK], but in all the other [subjects] I didn't," Atkinson said. "The bad teachers let us do whatever we wanted, and we had a sub every week. [I received] average grades, even though I didn't learn a lot from most teachers."

Atkinson said his school experience changed after he transferred. "At WCA they didn't give us much homework like they did at MLK. The teachers were nice and taught us a lot. It was an improvement over MLK," he said.

Unlike Atkinson, sophomore Daeshawn Burr attended MLK for the entirety of his pre-high school education. "MLK was academically bad for me," he said. "They weren't teaching us some stuff that we needed to learn. When I came to Tam I felt underprepared."

Burr elaborated on his rough transition. "I had an F in [Algebra 1-2], both semesters last year," he said. Although he admits that "I wasn't pushing myself to do well," he also added, "My [freshman math teacher] was kind of bad. She was all over the place. I went up to her to get help a few times, but she never helped me. I think she was probably busy." Burr is now in Algebra Foundations.

Tam Social Studies teacher Dr. Claire Ernst defended Tam, in response to Burr's claim that he was underserved by a school instructor. "Our job is to teach all students and to differentiate [instruction] so every student can learn and succeed," she said. "Math poses a lot of challenges in that regard, but our math department in general does a great job. A lot of support is available for kids that need it."

However, Ernst does notice a pattern among the students who require the most additional academic support. "Broadly speaking, students that have been through MLK come in with fewer skills," she said. If a student is struggling, Ernst said she will "meet [the student] at tutorial, restructure assignments, break things into smaller pieces, [and] individualize attention during class."

Berkley, who came to Tam from MLK, also spoke about a rocky transition to high school. "I wanted to go [to MLK], because it was close to my house and in my neighborhood, [but] I didn't feel prepared coming here from MLK," he said. Berkley had a particularly challenging time upon arrival at Tam. "It was a bigger school and I didn't know a lot of the students," he said.

Senior Jaiana Harris, who went to MLK and WCA, has also experienced a fair amount of alienation at Tam. "At MLK everyone's black, but [at Tam] you feel like an outsider," Harris said. Multiple African American students expressed outrage over how welcomed they were by the Tam athletic community, only to then be rejected come school time.

"We are only important during sports, but when it comes to academics, they don't care about us," Harris said, as several nearby African American students chimed in with their agreement. "[Black students] are used for sports… and during the classroom, [there's] no love for us," Berkley added.

Racial issues arise frequently at Tam, unbeknownst to many white members of the community.

"Students feel isolated, due to being black and alone in a class…You feel like you don't belong," Principal J.C. Farr said. At Tam, events such as Breakthrough Day, which took place on February 27 (2017), can help the community unite to mend issues of racial segregation. However, many minority students felt that Breakthrough Day didn't do enough. "I thought [Breakthrough Day] was a waste of time, because it was teachers running it instead of students, and all our teachers that ran it are white," junior Pedro Mira said.

Another issue, according to freshman Ta'Naejah Reed, was a widespread indifference expressed by white students during the day's activities. "I felt [Breakthrough Day] was good, but people couldn't really connect. If you weren't colored or weren't a different race you didn't really connect to it and it wasn't that important," she said.

Breakthrough Day may have catalyzed conversations about race at Tam, even though it evidently left plenty to be desired. Regardless, the Tam administration is actively exploring race and poverty, with regards to the achievement gap. "It's a very complex issue," Farr said. "Some of it is due to preparation and the quality of middle school education."

Chaotic Teacher Turnover

Farr went on to explain one problem in particular that MLK recently faced. "They went months without having a single math teacher for the 8th grade. Those who even receive instruction are greatly advantaged," he said.

Berkley has experienced firsthand MLK's chaotic teacher turnover. "There were so many teacher switches at MLK. There were always new teachers and subs. It was confusing," he said. Almost every former MLK student interviewed mentioned teacher turnover as a substantial difficulty.

SMCSD has had an ongoing problem with teacher turnover, especially as of late. "Sausalito Marin City is a revolving door district. Statistically, having good teachers is the most important thing, and there is definitely more turnover than you want to see," Barrow said.

Referring to MLK's math teaching vacancy, Barrow said they had had a teacher lined up to fill the position, but he quit unexpectedly after a week.

"I don't know the reasons why he left. It could have been culture shock. Maybe he had another job lined up. It takes a special kind of teacher to operate in this environment," Barrow said. "Money doesn't drive the turnover. People just like to be involved in something successful."

The Shanker Institute reported significantly higher turnover rates at schools with a large disadvantaged population, compared to schools with a smaller disadvantaged population. When 34 percent or less of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, teacher turnover rates average 12.8 percent per year. At schools where upwards of 75 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, teacher turnover rates nearly double, to an average of 22 percent per year.

Acknowledging that "all teachers are special in their own right," Barrow listed some of the qualities that make a person a good fit for working at MLK. "[They need a] desire to work with low-income and minority students, cultural awareness and sensitivity, particularly with African American, Hispanic, and the many other ethnic groups we serve, [and the] ability to work in a small district which may not have the specialization, process maturity, systems, or support structures of a large district," he said.

In a research analysis report, the Center for Public Education corroborated Barrow's analysis, suggesting that a good teacher is integral to student success. "Research consistently shows that teacher quality-whether measured by content knowledge, experience, training and credentials, or general intellectual skills-is strongly related to student achievement: Simply, skilled teachers produce better student results," the organization reported.

Tam has recently taken on an active role in trying to stop MLK's teacher carousel. "[Math department teacher leader] David Wetzel was assigned to teach at MLK, part time, for the semester," Farr said.

"MLK, for over a year, did not have a math teacher, so I asked the school to let me go over there to teach math and they said yes. I have been teaching there [part time] since the start of the semester," Wetzel said.

This is not the first time Wetzel has sought to help the academically challenged school. "Ten years ago, students coming [to Tam] from MLK were underperforming, so we started the MLK Math Transition Program, and MLK student's performance went up," he said. "Then SMCSD canceled the program, after three years, and performance went down again." Wetzel and Barrow both said that they did not know why the program had been cancelled.

Regardless, things are now looking up for MLK 8th graders, according to Wetzel. "The students are very grateful and positive now that they have a math teacher again. They are working very hard to learn as much material as possible," he said. From SMCSD's point of view, Barrow said, "The Wetzel situation is kind of like a band-aid. It's a temporary fix."

Funding, Education, and Added Stressors

Teacher pay could be a factor in SMCSD's turnover problem, given that teachers at MVMS have a higher average salary than teachers MLK or WCA. However, it would appear that funding in general is not the main driving force behind the district's poor academic performance. "On dollars per student, SMCSD is far ahead of MVSD, even after all of Kiddo's contributions," said Barrow.

Kiddo, which Barrow is referring to, is a nonprofit founded in 1982 that funds all Mill Valley School District (MVSD) campuses, covering kids from kindergarten to 8th grade. In the 2015-2016 school year alone, Kiddo raised almost $3.5 million for the district. A vast majority of this money goes straight into the schools.

Barrow is convinced that there are many other causes at play, unrelated to finances. "It's not all about money. It's about leadership, structure, consistency, and many other factors," he said. "I wouldn't say that Kiddo is why MVSD is doing so great. It helps, but it's not primary, and I don't know what they're doing right, but I do know that they have [a greater] size and a [smaller] disadvantaged population."

Students who come from low-income families face many academic obstacles. In their book about improving school performance, William Parrett and Kathleen Budge, both of whom have Ph.Ds in the educational field, wrote that "[Students living in poverty] may have limited access to high-quality day care, limited access to before-or after-school care, and limited physical space in their homes to create private or quiet environments conducive to study." They also reported that economic privilege manifests itself early, and those who don't have it suffer from the start. "…Substandard housing, inadequate medical care, and poor nutrition can affect the rate of childhood disease, premature births, and low birth weights, all of which affect a child's physical and cognitive development," they wrote.

In addition to navigating potential stressors at home, many students reported struggling with an environment at MLK that they did not find conducive to learning. "It was so easy to get in trouble there. It's a small classroom, with all of your friends. A lot of students in there were messing around and stopping the class," Berkley said. When faculty tried to intervene with students' misbehavior, Berkley felt that it sometimes made things worse.

"[I had an] English teacher [who] was too busy punishing kids that she didn't teach us anything," he said.

Berkley was not the only MLK alum whose experience was marred significantly by feuds between the students and the adults. Many felt that the constant conflict hampered their ability to learn much at all.

On the other end of the spectrum, MVMS alumna and current Tam sophomore Alexis Detjen-Creson said, "The school [MVMS] made sure that you did well. If you were struggling, the teacher would talk to you in private about getting your performance back on track."

Compounding the inequities between the two districts is the contrast in their sizes. Because MVSD has a massive population of around 3,400 students, compared to the relatively tiny SMCSD population of 540 students, it has more resources and can operate more efficiently. "[SMCSD] is one of the smallest [districts] in Marin. There are nineteen school districts in the county. We need to fix that," Barrow said.

Barrow has started a committee to try to combine SMCSD and MVSD into one district. "To consolidate like this, you need to hold a vote on it. If it got through, the governing board and the voters would be invested in improving Sausalito Marin City student's performance. The community at large would be pushing for this betterment," Barrow said. The community, in this case, would be families from Sausalito, Marin City, and Mill Valley, all working together to accomplish the same goal: improving academic success. The issue has not yet been brought to a vote; however, for the measure to pass, two-thirds of voters would have to approve it, a tall order for any bill.

Politics and Education

SMCSD has been subject to a fair amount of controversy as of late, primarily due to the release of a Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) report, an organization that investigates the financial status of local educational agencies. Published on August 10, 2016, the report concluded that: "The district has not met the needs of students at Bayside MLK, and the result is that students are underachieving." More specifically, MLK students are scoring well below average in statewide testing, in addition to being outperformed by their own district counterpart: WCA.

The assessment has since been disputed by SMCSD, who stated on their website that "The report was called into question by the Sausalito Marin City School District Board of Trustees, as it contained several factual inaccuracies and unfounded allegations."

The political controversy surrounding SMCSD can distract from the most important issue: the well-being and success of the students. There are some external organizations that are actively helping out, such as Marin Promise, which aims to propel disadvantaged students through high school and into college. There has been an increased effort to improve student's 9th grade math readiness, and Wetzel is currently working with the group to find solutions.

Another group is Bridge the Gap College Prep, which is a "college preparatory and youth development organization that provides programming aimed at preparing Marin City students for college success," according to their mission statement.

The effectiveness of such programs cannot accurately be measured at this time, due to a lack of available information and statistics from said non-profits.

Barrow has made an effort to address the matter at an earlier grade level "By high school, it's too late to integrate low and high income students," he said.

Measure A of 2016, a bill that would have, among many other things, created low price or free preschool for underserved children in Marin County, failed. This was a great disappointment for Barrow, who was hoping to improve kid's readiness for kindergarten.

The Marin GOP was a staunch opponent of Measure A, due to a common conservative opposition to welfare expansion. This may have resulted in the failure of the bill, even in a predominantly liberal area.

Granted, it's best to confront the achievement gap with younger kids, but high schools still have to take responsibility for their role in the issue, according to Farr. "We are amping up transition programs over the summer, to build up student's skills," said Principal Farr. "[It has taken me] some time to try and develop an understanding of the situation." Farr wants the Tam community to know that "We're committed to addressing the achievement gap."

Despite facing many obstacles throughout his educational career, Senior Tre'chaun Berkley is now looking to move forward, via higher education. After looking into various options, he finally made his decision. "I'm going to go to a community college, then [I'll] transfer into a university after two years," Berkley said. Reflecting on his time in high school, he added, "For the future [minority] students [at Tam], I want to say look to be a leader, [not] a follower."

Milo Levine is a student-journalist who serves as a news editor and editorial board member for The Tam News, a school paper located in Mill Valley, CA. Milo has won a national Certificate of Merit from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.

California Values Bill SB-54: What It Is About and Why It is Important to Women

By Cherise Charleswell

California Legislation, particularly health policy and those dealing with public safety, is of great importance to the United States as a whole; and this is because California has always stood out as a leader and innovator. Other states, and even the Federal government, often look to the precedents set by California, and subsequently go on to pass the same or similar policies. As stated in a 2012 article , California sets trends in health regulation , "Some advocates tout the state as a forward-thinking vanguard in which its health and safety laws are routinely emulated by other states".

In short, California's laws shape and set standards for the rest of the country.

The California Values Bill SB-54 is often incorrectly referred to as the Sanctuary City Bill. The phrase "sanctuary city bill" is inaccurate because there is unfortunately no guarantee of sanctuary in the U.S. City officials do not have the power to outright stop the federal government from deporting people in their communities. Cities and States could merely choose to carry out a symbolic policy - which includes having local police abstain from helping federal authorities identify, detain, or deport any immigrants that entered the U.S. illegally.

What exactly is a Sanctuary City?

In 1996, the 104th U.S. Congress passed Pub. L. 104-208, also known as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act ( IIRIRA ). The IIRIRA requires local governments to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency. Despite the IIRIRA, hundreds of urban, suburban, and rural communities have resisted and outright ignored the law, instead choosing to adopt and enact sanctuary policies.

A sanctuary city is a city that limits its cooperation with the national government effort to enforce immigration law. Essentially, sanctuary cities act as a protective shield, standing in the way of federal efforts to pinpoint and deport people at random.

According to recent reports from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, California has the fourth most counties and second most cities considered to have adopted laws, policies or practices that may impede some immigration enforcement efforts. The state of Oregon has the most, with 31 counties, followed by Washington (18), Pennsylvania (16) and California (15). Massachusetts has the most cities considered to be "sanctuary," and California follows with three. However, The Los Angeles Times reported that ICE suspended the recently adopted practice of reporting cities that don't comply with federal detention efforts following error-ridden reports.

The California Values Bill entails the following:

• Prohibit state or local resources from being used to investigate, detain, detect, report or arrest persons for immigration enforcement purposes.

• Ban state and local resources from being used to facilitate the creation of a national registry based on religion.

• Prevent state agencies from collecting or sharing immigration information from individuals unless necessary to perform agency duties.

• Ensure that California schools, hospitals and courthouses remain safe and accessible to all California residents regardless of immigration status.

Why this Legislation and Protection of Sanctuary Cities Is Important to Public Health & Safety

Consider a scenario where there is a serial rapist, but his initial victims were all undocumented and thus unwilling to contact police to report the crime, and this rapist then goes on to harm others - legal citizens.

Would we now find his crime egregious? Would we now want to remove this guy off of the streets so he can no longer harm others?

The logical answer would be yes, but it does not dismiss the fact that all other subsequent rapes could have been prevented if the first victim felt safe enough to come forward. This scenario describes the importance of sanctuary cities and the California Values Bill, in terms of public health and safety. It would help to ensure that those residing in the state of California, regardless of documented status, can come forward to report crimes committed against themselves and others to law enforcement.

Why this Legislation and Protection of Sanctuary Cities Is Important to Victims of Intimate Partner Violence

For the same reasons as described as above. Furthermore, abusers use the threat of reporting undocumented victims or even members of their families who may be undocumented, as a means to (1) ensure that they conceal the abuse and not report them to the police, (2) force them to return to abusive situations. And the end result of this may be continued abuse and even death at the hands of their abusers.

A civilized society should simply not allow members of their communities to be forced to remain in abusive situations.

Why this Legislation and Protection of Sanctuary Cities Is Important to Victims of Human Sex Trafficking

For transnational victims of sex traffickers (including those who were trafficked here against their own will), the threat of deportation and/or criminalization is used as a tool to keep them silent, subservient, and in bondage. Traffickers make every effort to discourage them from contacting law enforcement, who along with other first responders are among the people who are the first to come in contact with victims of trafficking, while they are still in captivity. Having this population live in fear of exposing their undocumented status simply helps to perpetuate human trafficking.

The following testimony and passage was included in the 2009 US Department of Health's Study of HHS Programs Serving Human Trafficking Victims:

"Fear of law enforcement and fear of retaliation. Next, respondents noted that fear is a significant deterrent to foreign-born victims coming forward and being identified, specifically fear of law enforcement and fear of retaliation from the trafficker. In most cases, it was reported that victims were taught to fear law enforcement, either as a result of experiences with corrupt governments and law enforcement in their countries of origin or as a result of the traffickers telling the victims that if they are caught, law enforcement will arrest them and deport them. The trafficker paints a picture of the victim as the criminal in the eyes of law enforcement. Additionally, the trafficker uses the threat of harm against the victim and/or his or her family as a means of control and a compelling reason for the victim to remain hidden. In some cases, these fears were in fact the ultimate reality for the victim. Service providers gave several examples of clients being placed into deportation hearings after coming forward to law enforcement."

So, why do we say "victims" of sex trafficking?

Well this has to do with various factors, including the fact that the domestic entry age is 12-14 years. When one is that young, surely they are unable to consent or engage in any decision-making regarding sexual activity. Further, no one is granted their freedom simply because they have had an 18th birthday. For this reason, victims can be held in captivity and exploited for many years, well into adulthood.

And each year involved in trafficking makes it more difficult to get out. These victims are dealing with stunted development, lack of education and job skills training, drug abuse and mental illness related to the complex trauma that they have endured, and threats of violence and death for even trying to escape. There is nothing sex positive about these circumstances, and those who are the most vulnerable are people of color, LGBTQ folks (especially transgender women who engage in survival sex), low-income individuals, and of course immigrants. The "Pretty Woman" fantasy does not apply here.

One has to keep in mind that, due to socio-cultural reasons and the effects of exploitation, victims of all forms of human trafficking do not readily identify as victims.

Traffickers use the following methods to recruit:

Traffickers and/or pimps rely on various methods of recruitment, and they include:

• Psychological manipulation - making a woman/girl fall in love

• Debt

• Drugs and drug addiction

• "Gorilla" Pimping - utilization of force, kidnapping, and physical harm to achieve a victim's submission

• Working with Those in Positions of Authority - parents, guardian, older siblings, foster parent, or an authoritarian figure who forces a victim into bondage.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 actually defines severe forms of trafficking in persons as that which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery (22 U.S.C. § 7102).

What Next?

Whether you are a resident of California or not, you should contact California legislators and encourage them to support this Bill.

A list of California legislators can be found here .

For more insights and tips, see the guide H ow To Lobby The California State Legislature: A Guide To Participation .

The Nurses' Union That Made Medicine Sick: How the Oligarchs Hypnotized Labor Leaders to Betray Working-Class Communities of Color

By Jon Jeter

Opened in 1889, O'Connor Hospital was the first in the city of San Jose, and the second in California to be chartered and managed by the Daughters of Charity, a 400-year-old Catholic mission founded by St. Vincent de Paul. Its benefactor, Judge Myles P. O'Connor, made his fortune in mining and he and his wife, Amanda, were two of Silicon Valley's first philanthropists. They had originally planned to open an old-age home and an orphanage, but the local Archbishop convinced the couple that the needs of what would grow to become the state's third most populous city were far too prolific to address only that which vexed the very young, and the very old.

For the next 125 years, the Daughters of Charity faithfully served San Jose's sick, pregnant, and poor, the hospital's fortunes rising and falling in tandem with that of Santa Clara County's laboring classes. With paychecks buoyed by postwar productivity and assertive trade unions, the order built a new, state-of-the art campus on the city's east side in 1953, just as Americans were bursting at the seams with hope, and babies.

Similar to the protagonist in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, however, O'Connor went broke, gradually at first, and then suddenly, as good-paying jobs dried up, culminating in the ruinous 2008 recession that left millions of Californians unable to pay their hospital tab. Forced to borrow heavily just to stay afloat, the Daughters of Charity Health System announced in 2014 what would've once been unthinkable: a sale of its network of six hospitals.

More jarring still was the colorful streetscape that greeted morning commuters on Forest Avenue as they approached O'Connor's main gate in the first days of 2015. As the low-watt January sun doused the Santa Cruz mountains in a champagne-colored dew, motorists were visibly puzzled, some even scratching their heads as they passed by.

On the campus' north lawn, nearly 100 protesters clad in robin's-breast red, chanted, cheered and hoisted placards that read: "Nurses and nuns agree: Approve the Sale."

To the south, maybe 20 yards away, stood another 100 or so demonstrators clad entirely in blue, brandishing signs that read: "Save our Hospital; Reject the Sale."

The dueling rallies prefaced a public hearing by California's State Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is legally required to approve the sale of nonprofit hospitals, and pitted one powerful labor union - the California Nurses Association in red - against another - the Service Employees' International Union, in blue.

Dubbed by the Nation Magazine as the country's most progressive trade union, the CNA and its umbrella organization, National Nurses United, endorsed a proposal by Daughters of Charity executives to sell the chain to Prime, a southern California-based healthcare provider with a reputation for ripping off Medicaid, its patients, and its workforce. A 2014 federal audit of Prime hospitals, for instance, found 217 cases of improperly diagnosed kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition that is seldom seen in the US, and typically found only in the global South. Unsurprisingly, Medicaid reimbursement rate for the the disease is quite high when compared with other maladies.

The SEIU, on the other hand, favored a sale to a Wall Street hedge fund named Blue Wolf with no management experience in the healthcare industry, but a demonstrated proficiency for dismantling businesses and auctioning its parts off to the highest bidders.

But here's the thing: San Jose's working-class communities - a Benetton- blend of Latinos, south Asians, Blacks and Whites - wanted neither, Prime least of all.

Had they bothered to show up for any of the dozen or so community stakeholder meetings held in 2014, the CNA's leadership might have known this. But Bob Brownstein, the executive director of the civic organization, Working Partners USA, could only remember seeing a CNA labor representative at a single meeting, and if he chimed in on the discussion, Brownstein couldn't recall.

Labor representatives for the SEIU, on the other hand, and Blue Wolf executives were fixtures at the stakeholders' meetings.

"I don't think either union did much of anything," Brownstein recalled more than a year later, "but SEIU was clearly more comfortable in dealing with the community. As I recall, there was someone from Blue Wolf and the SEIU at every meeting and they answered every question that everyone put to them. They were clearly trying to generate answers and they even made some changes to the original proposal" to win the community's approval.

"Their offer was more opaque but they did a much better job than Prime did in acknowledging community concerns. We never trusted Blue Mountain but the community was much more worried about Prime."

So much so that a coalition of 15 civic groups wrote a joint letter to Harris urging her to veto the sale to Prime. The stakeholders' clear preference was Santa Clara County which had bid on O'Connor, and whose health care network had a regional reputation for providing quality care to the uninsured that was second only to O'Connor's.

But Daughters of Charity executives did not want to break up the set, so-to-speak, and preferred selling all six hospitals to a single bidder.

"I don't know why the California Nurses Association didn't help us push the county's bid," said Grace-Sonia E. Melanio, Communications Director for Community Health Partnership, which was one of the authors of the letter to the attorney general's office.

"I assume it was because they don't represent county nurses but I don't know that for a fact."

By January of 2015, Brownstein, Melanio and others knew that shifting the conversation from the two labor-backed bidders to the county's bid was a longshot, at best.

Still, Melanio recalls her astonishment at seeing the the tsunami of red and blue as she pulled into the O'Connor parking lot ahead of that January public hearing.

"I was shocked," she said, "to see that the unions had the community outnumbered by roughly 100 to 1."

"You Got to Dance with Them That Brung You"

The question of who killed organized labor in the US has always been something of a whodunit for me, until I went to work as a communications specialist for the California Nurses Association in January of 2015.

The action at O'Connor was my first week on the job and the hospital's ultimate sale to a Wall Street hedge fund was tantamount to an exhumation. After examining the cadaver close up, I can report that all evidence identifies the killer beyond a shadow of a doubt:

It was a suicide.

What proved the undoing of the labor movement was not the bloodlessness of conservatives, but the faithlessness of liberals; not the 1 percent's dearth of compassion, but the 99 percent's failure of imagination; not the corruption of the managerial class but trade union leaders' desertion of the very communities that made the American labor movement a force to be reckoned with in the first place.

"You got to dance," the immortal Molly Ivins once wrote, " with them what brung you." After collaborating with workers of all races to create a middle-class that stands as the singular achievement of the Industrial era, unions switched dance partners mid-song.

In championing Prime Health Care, the nurses' union, and its Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro, carried water for a venal corporate class in much the same fashion that the Democratic Party, and its titular leader, Hillary Clinton, runs interference for Wall Street, leaving the people of San Jose to choose from the lesser of two evils, just as voters in next week's presidential ballot have no good options.

This is no coincidence. Beginning in earnest with Wall Street's 1975 takeover of New York City's budget, corporate executives have wooed both Democrats and labor union leaders with increasing assertiveness, in a concerted effort to thwart the interracial labor movement that is the only fighting force to ever battle the plutocrats' to a draw.

To put only slightly too fine a point on it, financiers' courtship of labor in the postwar era mirrors Napoleon's recruitment of Haiti's mulattoes to help put down the island's slave mutiny. Both counter- revolutions drove a wedge through the opposition with a psych-ops campaign that can be reduced to a question of identity:

Are you a worker, or are you white?

No More Beautiful Sight

The Bay area can make a credible claim to being the birthplace of the modern labor movement. When West Coast longshoremen went on strike at the height of the Great Depression, Blacks who had consistently been rebuffed in their efforts to integrate the docks, jumped at the chance to work, albeit for smaller paychecks than their white peers.

Confronted with a failing strike, the head of the longshoremen's union, an Australian émigré named Harry Bridges, toured African American churches on both sides of the Bay bridge, according to the late journalist Thomas Fleming.

From the pulpit, Bridges acknowledged the union's historical mistreatment of Blacks, but promised skeptical parishioners that if they respected the pickets, they would work the ports up and down the West Coast, earning the same wage as white dockworkers.

They did, and the strike's subsequent success triggered a wave of labor militancy that not only imbued the economy with buying power, but connected workers' discontent with broader political struggles for affordable housing, free public education, infrastructure improvements, and civil rights.

"Negro-white unity has proved to be the most effective weapon against the shipowners," the historian Philip S. Foner quoted a dockworker saying in his book, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, "against the raiders and all our enemies."

When Oakland's two chic department stores, Kahns and Hastings, denied pay raises to their mostly women employees in 1946, nearly 100,000 union members - mostly men - walked off the job in solidarity.

But they didn't stop there, shutting down the whole of Alameda County for the better part of two days, ordering businesses to close, and turning back deliveries of everything other than essential medical supplies and beer, which they commandeered to hold a bi-racial bacchanal in the streets of Oakland, dancing, singing, and exulting in the power of the many.

It was the last general strike in US history; within months, Congress overrode President Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act which, among other things, outlawed so-called sympathy strikes, and mandated trade unions to expel Communists from their ranks.

Still, the working class maintained its swagger for another generation.

Invoking eminent domain, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency razed thousands of structures in the city's "blighted" Fillmore neighborhood, forcing nearly 10,000, mostly Black households to relocate, and transforming Geary Street into an eight-lane monstrosity which sealed off the Fillmore from the whiter and wealthier Pacific Heights.

In a 1963 interview with the Boston television station WGBH, about his iconic documentary, Take This Hammer, James Baldwin said this:

"A boy last week - he was 16, in San Francisco - told me on television….He said, "I've got no country. I've got no flag." Now, he's only 16 years old, and I couldn't say, "You do." I don't have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging - as most Northern cities now are engaged - in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out."

Among those who took notice of the Fillmore's gentrification was Lou Goldblatt, who was, at the time, the second-in-command of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the very same union that had integrated the West Coast's docks.

"There was no reason why the pension funds should just be laying around being invested in high-grade securities, Goldblatt later recalled. I thought there was no reason why that money shouldn't be used to build some low-cost housing."

The ILWU created the Longshore Redevelopment Corporation to pounce on the three city blocks-out of a total of 60- that the city had set aside for affordable housing.

In her 1964 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, Josephine Solomon described her new digs: "I've just moved into my new home in St. Francis Square…and living here is quite clearly going to be exhilarating and, more important, the best possible place in which I can raise my children. About 100 families have already moved in…and we have representatives of all races and colors living together as neighbors. There is no more beautiful sight in this town than our marvelous, mixed-up collection of white, brown, and yellow children playing together in the sunny community square every afternoon."

Who's The Boss?

"C'mon people, what are some more nurses values?"

I was nearly four months into my stint at the CNA when I found myself in a half-lit, mildewed, second-floor conference room in the union's downtown Oakland office, seated among a clutch of maybe 7 or 8 other communications staffers, all but two of us-an Asian woman and myself-who are non-white.

The task this late April afternoon was to identify "nurses values," which I had assumed meant that I would help pore over the results of a nurses' questionnaire to produce a coherent ad campaign.

Instead, the communications manager, Sarah Cecile, stood astride an easel that leaned like a sprinter at the finish line, her magic marker poised to add to the wan list of nouns that glared accusingly at me, reducing Hegelian dialectical inquiry to a game of fucking charades.

"Wait," I said, "we're telling the nurses what their values should be? Shouldn't we be asking the nurses what their values are, you know, like in a survey, or a poll?"

"That's a bad word for us," said a graphic artist who'd worked for the CNA for several years. "Polling is frowned upon here."

"Maybe they know something I don't," I said sarcastically, "but if we're telling the rank and file what to do, doesn't that make the union just another boss that the nurses have to answer to?

Should communications organize a coup of sorts?" I asked provocatively.

When I returned to my office 30 minutes later, I had an email from De Moro's secretary, summoning me to a meeting with the executive director the following morning.

This was extraordinary for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was that despite sharing the same floor as the executive staff, it was an unwritten rule that communications was to have no contact with top management. This directive went so far as to prohibit communications from either emailing executives directly, or from entering or exiting through the executives' north wing.

Moreover, I was told that both the executive staff, and the board, were almost all lily-white, save for one Latino and one African-American on each.

What I remember most about the next day's meeting is the mirthless half-smile that DeMoro wore like a mask for nearly the entire 45-minutes, reminding me of Sir Richard Burton's description of Lucille Ball as "a monster of staggering charmlessness."

She began by asking me if I had any ideas for trying to improve the union's communications effort, which was odd, since she'd blown off an email with my suggestions for doing exactly that only weeks earlier.

"Anything we could do to make this more of a bottom-up effort would be to the union's benefit," I recall saying. "It seems we spend an awful lot of time trying to talk to people who really aren't interested in what we have to say, and not enough rallying and organizing the community to put pressure on decision makers."

By this time, California's Secretary-of-State, Harris had already, effectively vetoed the sale to Prime by attaching such stringent conditions to the transaction that she knew no corporation would accept the terms. I had publicly predicted as much months earlier; knowing that Harris would rely heavily on Wall Street to finance her US Senate campaign, I'd proposed, unsuccessfully, writing articles interrogating the investment firm's mishandling of other businesses it had acquired.

But DeMoro's communications' director, a walking mediocrity named Chuck Idelson, had all of the imagination of a lamp post, and only half the personality. His idea of media relations was sending out at least one anemic press release per day, then marshaling the entire communication staff for two days to badger journalists we had no relationship with to cover news conferences that were wholly absent any news. A North Carolina rally for the Robin Hood tax on Wall Street transactions was attended by two people, the parents of Cecile, the communications manager.

As presidential hopefuls began campaigning in Iowa ahead of that state's all important caucus, the nurses' union planned to launch an ad campaign against Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker.

"Why in the world would you do that?" I asked Idelson one day in early 2015 just as the primary season was beginning to take shape.

"Well, Walker is really bad on labor," Idelson said.

"All the Republicans are bad on labor," I said. "All the Democrats too. You're gonna tell the rank-and-file that you spent a quarter-of-a-million dollars to help send union-busting Hillary Clinton to the White House? Why don't they spend that money on organizing, or on an ad campaign to support Black Lives Matter. Police violence against people of color is a public health crisis," I said. "Who is more credible on that issue than nurses?"

Moreover, I said, a California-based trade union buying ads in Iowa with union dues will surely be used as a cudgel with which to beat organized labor upside the head.

I repeated my concerns to DeMoro, but with that awkward smile on her face, she made it clear that she shared neither my faith in the rank-and-file, or the community.

"The nurses have some issues," she said at our meeting. "We need for more of them to support the Democrats and to work the phone banks and things like that," she said. "And frankly," she said, abandoning all pretense now, her smile dissolving into a contemptuous frown, "they need to be more progressive, more radical and to take more chances."

DeMoro's annual salary at the time was $359,000, more than triple the average nurse's yearly pay.

You Ain't White

Portraying Leftists as subversives, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act required trade unions to weed out suspected communists, according to the historian Foner, by asking Black workers questions like:

"Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group?"

And this: Have you ever danced with a white girl?"

Whites were asked if they had ever entertained Blacks in their homes, and witnesses, Foner wrote, were asked "Have you ever had any conversations that would lead you to believe (the accused) is rather advanced in his thinking on racial matters?"

Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, would later acknowledge that this purge of communists from trade unions was akin to severing the umbilical cord while the baby was still in the womb, starving the most democratizing social movements of a vital fuel-source.

Much of the labor movement's bandwidth however, could not be measured in muscle, or union-dues, but in imagination, as demonstrated by the ILWU's Goldblatt's vision of a Beloved Community, fashioned from the stevedores' pension fund.

"So let's all be careful," United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther once said, "that we don't play the bosses game by falling for the Red Scare."

And then Reuther went on to play the bosses game, expertly, chasing Marxists from the union, isolating Black workers, and reverting to the anodyne reforms that characterized the ineffective, segregated unions before the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. So disillusioned were Black autoworkers with Reuther's tripartite alliance with Detroit's industrialists and the Democrats that by the late 1960s, many had begun to joke that the acronym UAW stood for "U Ain't White."

The tipping point, however, occurred in the midst of the 1975 fiscal crisis, when New York bankers hatched a scheme to recoup their losses on bad real estate investments from the wages, pensions, and subsidies shelled out to city employees and the working class. The facts were not on their side, and so the financiers played the only hand they knew to play: race.

Doubling down on the Birth-of-a-Nation narrative, the city's oligarchs, and their friends in the media, portrayed Blacks as a menace to the civic project, exploiting racial resentment of a Black polity that had found its voice mostly through labor unions.

In a 1976 episode of the NBC television series, McCloud, titled "The Day New York Turned Blue," the stetson-wearing New Mexico sheriff- an avatar for white, male supremacy- almost single-handedly rescues Gotham from ruin, largely by convincing an Italian cop named Rizzo to cross a picket line, and help repel an attack by the mafia, who ambush police headquarters to kill a mob attorney-turned state's witness.

Aside from the mafia, the villains in this urban morality tale are the police union-led by the Bad Nigger that 1970s America loved to hate, Carl Weathers-which refuses to call off a labor walkout in the city's time-of-need, and a prostitute who is drugging her clients-one an accountant visiting New York to audit federal bailout money-with a fatal, suffocating blue paint.

Playing the role of Rizzo in real-life was the head of the city's largest municipal union, Victor Gotbaum. In his book, Working Class New York, the historian Joshua B. Freeman wrote of Gotbaum and his partner, Joe Bigel:

"Having seen the power of the financial community,the hostility of the federal government, and the divisions within the union movement, they shied away from a militant, independent labor strategy which might have led to them being blamed for a city bankruptcy. Instead, they preferred to make concessions and invest their members' pension money in city debt in return for a place at or near the table, where discussions about the city's future were being made by financiers, businessmen, and state and federal officials. Gotbaum became so entranced by the power elite . . .that within a few years he and (investment banker Felix) Rohatyin were calling each other best friends, even holding a joint birthday party in Southampton."

DeMoro is an heir to Gotbaum, not Goldblatt. If she or any of her lieutenants had an ounce of imagination I never saw it. Consider that at no time during the Daughter's of Charity sale, did I ever once hear anyone mention the possibility of pushing for legislation to convert O'Connor to a worker, or community-managed health co-op, similar to the ILWU's response to the Fillmore's housing crisis.

Shortly after Harris nixed the Prime deal, DeMoro called an emergency all-staff meeting in March of 2015, in which she bluntly asked the 65 or so staff members for their suggestions.

"If we don't do something different now, we're going to die," she said.

A young Latina labor organizer raised her hand, and said: "Why don't we start to build partnerships with the immigrant rights community that's politically active and organizing across California," I recall her saying. "We could really strengthen our own organizing capacity and deepen our roots in a community that is looking to join forces with institutional allies."

You could've heard a gnat piss on cotton in Georgia.

Later, the young organizer would tell me privately me that had she been a white, male labor organizer, and replaced immigrant rights community with some off-brand faction of Silicon Valley white liberals, say Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, DeMoro would've been over the moon.

"Everybody knows that RoseAnn loves her white boys," she said.

As for me, I was fired a week after proposing a coup because "you don't seem happy here."

It was May 1, or May Day.

This was originally posted on Jon's personal blog.

Jon Jeter is the author of 'Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People,' and the co-author of 'A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama's Postracial America.' He is a former Washington Post Bureau Chief in southern Africa and South America, a former producer for This American Life, and twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Lying to Children About the California Missions and the Indian

By Deborah A. Miranda

All my life, I have heard only one story about California Indians: Godless, dirty, stupid, primitive, ugly, passive, drunken, immoral, lazy, weak-willed people who might make good workers if properly trained and motivated. What kind of story is that to grow up with?

The story of the missionization of California.

In 1769, after missionizing much of Mexico, the Spaniards began to move up the west coast of North America in order to establish claims to rich resources and before other European nations could get a foothold. Together, the Franciscan priests and Spanish soldiers "built" a series of 21 missions along what is now coastal California. (California's Indigenous Peoples, numbering more than 1 million at the time, did most of the actual labor.) These missions, some rehabilitated from melting adobe, others in near-original state, are now one of the state's biggest tourist attractions; in the little town of Carmel, Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo isthebiggest attraction. Elsewhere, so-called Mission décor drenches Southern California, from restaurants to homes, apartment buildings, animal shelters, grocery stores, and post offices. In many neighborhoods, a bastardized Mission style is actually required by cities or neighborhood associations. Along with this visual mythology of adobe and red clay roof tiles comes the cultural storytelling that drains the missions of their brutal and bloody pasts for popular consumption.

In California schools, students come up against the "Mission Unit" in 4th grade, reinforcing the same lies those children have been breathing in most of their lives. Part of California's history curriculum, the unit is entrenched in the educational system and impossible to avoid, a powerfully authoritative indoctrination in Mission Mythology to which 4th graders have little if any resistance. Intense pressure is put upon students (and their parents) to create a "Mission Project" that glorifies the era and glosses over both Spanish and Mexican exploitation of Indians, as well as enslavement of those same Indians during U.S. rule. In other words, the Mission Unit is all too often a lesson in imperialism, racism, and Manifest Destiny rather than actually educational or a jumping-off point for critical thinking or accurate history.

In Harcourt School Publisher's California: A Changing State, the sacrifice for gold, riches, settlements, and violence by Spanish, English, and Russian explorers is well enunciated throughout Unit 2 and dressed in exciting language such as on page 113: "In one raid, Drake's crew took 80 pounds of gold!"

In four opening pages to Chapter 3 devoted to Father Junípero Serra, the textbook urges students to sympathize with the Spanish colonial mission:

"Mile after mile, day after day, week after week, the group traveled across the rugged terrain. As their food ran low, many of the men grew tired and sick. Father Serra himself suffered from a sore on one leg that grew worse each day. And yet he never gave up, calling on his faith in God to keep himself going."

The language jumps between an acknowledgement of the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples and of mutually beneficial exchanges. In Lesson 3, "The Mission System" opens: "Indians were forced to build a chain of missions." Subsequent language emphasizes the alleged benefits to the Indians:

"At the missions, the priests worked to create loyal Spanish subjects… They wouldmovethe California Indians into the missions, teach themto be Christians, andshow themEuropean ways." [Emphasis added.]

Visiting the mission as an adult, proud, mixed-blood California Indian woman, I found myself unprepared for gift shops well stocked with CDs of pre-researched Mission Projects; photocopied pamphlets of mission terms, facts, and history (one for each mission); coloring books; packaged models of missions ("easy assembly in 10 minutes!"); and other project paraphernalia for the discerning 4th grader and his or her worried parents.

The Carmel Mission website maintains a "4th Grade Corner" where daily life for padres and their "Indian friends" who "shared what little food and supplies they had" is blissfully described. Other websites offer "easy," "quick," and "guaranteed A+!!!" Mission Projects, targeting those anxious parents, for a price.

Generations of Californians have grown up steeped in a culture and education system that trains them to think of Indians as passive, dumb, and disappeared. In other words, the project is so well established, in such a predictable and well-loved rut, that veering outside of the worn but comfortable mythology is all but impossible.

On my visit to Mission Dolores, I found that out in a particularly visceral way.

It was over winter break, 2008. I was in San Francisco for a conference, and my friend Kimberly and I had hopped on a streetcar to visit Mission Dolores. As we emerged from the mission church via a side door into a small courtyard (featuring one of those giant dioramas behind glass), we inadvertently walked into video range of a mother filming her daughter's 4th-grade project.

Excusing ourselves, we studiously examined the diorama while the little girl flubbed her lines a few times. She was reading directly from the flyer given tourists in the gift shop and could say "basilica" but not "archdiocese," but she maintained her poise through several takes until she nailed it.

Both mothers ourselves, Kimberly and I paused to exchange a few words of solidarity about school projects with the mother, which gave Mom the chance to brag about how she and Virginia were trying to "do something a little different" by using video instead of making a model.

"That's great!" I said, giving them both a polite smile. "I'll bet your teacher will be glad to have something out of the ordinary."

"Well, it is different actually being right here," Mom said excitedly. "To think about all those Indians and how they lived all that time ago, that's kind of impressive."

I could not resist: "And better yet," I beamed, "still live! Guess what? I'm a member of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation myself! Some of my ancestors lived in this mission. I've found their names in the Book of Baptism." (I didn't mention that they are also listed in the Book of Deaths soon afterward.)

The mother was beside herself with pleasure, posed me with her daughter for a still photo, and wrote down my name so she could Google my work. Little Virginia, however, was shocked into silence. Her face drained, her body went stiff, and she stared at me as if I had risen, an Indigenous skeleton clad in decrepit rags, from beneath the clay bricks of the courtyard. Even though her mother and I talked a few more minutes, Virginia the 4th grader-previously a calm, articulate news anchor in training-remained a shy shadow, shooting side glances at me out of the corner of her eyes.

As Kimberly and I walked away, I thought, "That poor kid has never seen a live Indian, much less a 'Mission Indian'-she thought we were all dead!" Having me suddenly appear in the middle of her video project must have been a lot like turning the corner to find the (dead) person you were talking about suddenly in your face, talking back.

Kimberly, echoing my thoughts, chortled quietly, "Yes, Virginia, there really are live Mission Indians."

The problem is, thanks to Mission Mythology, most 4th graders will never know that and the textbooks don't help to give visibility to modern California Indians.

Throughout the rest of California: A Changing History, mentions of California Indians are brief and as victims fading into history. On page 242, under the heading of "A Changing Population," Harcourt states simply, "California Indians were hurt by the gold rush… Many were forced off their lands when the miners found gold there."

Many pages later, California Indians are mentioned again when the textbook devotes five paragraphs to Indian Governments. Although 109 tribes are recognized in California, in the text, they are faceless and noted only by red square dots on a map.

It's time for the Mission Fantasy Fairy Tale to end. This story has done more damage to California Indians than any conquistador, any priest, and soldado de cuera (leather-jacket soldier), any smallpox, measles, or influenza virus. This story has not just killed us, it has also taught us to kill ourselves and kill each other with alcohol, domestic violence, horizontal racism, internalized hatred.

We have to put an end to it now.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project's If We Knew Our History series. It originally appeared on March 23, 2015 at zinnedproject.org. Deborah A. Miranda is the author of "Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir" (Heyday Books, 2012). Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of California, and is also of Chumash and Jewish ancestry. She is a John Lucian Smith Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, and says reading lists for her students include as many books by "bad Indians" as possible. Visit Deborah Miranda's blog, BAD NDNS.