What Is To Be Done?

Take Power, Hold It, Use It

What Is To Be Done?

It feels important to keep pointing out the simple, basic, sweeping things that need to be done nationally.

It’s time to universalize everything — all for one and one for all.

It’s time to reject Trump’s bigoted capitalist bullshit, us against them, bigoted profiteering.

It’s time to reject establishment Democrats’ perpetual profiteering, and often equally brutal bigotry.

To get this done, the country needs to get its head out of its ass. It needs to reject supremacy and profiteering. It needs to embrace universality.

There is no alternative to implementing many sweeping universal programs, including as Presidential Orders, on day one of a new term. It’s a litmus test for candidates, and can be an inspiration to all. It’s as material as can be. Progressive and socialist emergency universal orders and acts for emergency times. To actually represent and fulfill the interests and the needs of the people.

Implementing universal programs that cover the entire human rights spectrum would greatly stimulate, improve, and transform the economy, people’s lives, and society.

And doing so would enable the demilitarization of everything, as everything must be demilitarized, the police state and the surveillance state, rolled back, the prisoner state and the debtor state eviscerated.

A strong progressive push in electoral politics and social organizing could get this done. Strikes and actions, organizing and propagandizing. The good kind of propaganda. The power of propaganda is crucial. The state, after all, has a monopoly on violence but not propaganda, not organizing, not acting, not striking.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights entirely backs universal programs that cover the entire human rights spectrum (not least as Sabia and Alecta know) and which ought to include at a minimum:

Guaranteed monthly income, higher wages, expanded poverty relief, universal health care, free childcare, paid family leave, the abolition of ICE, and full legalization and inclusion of undocumented people for the survival, dignity, and relief of all. Erased medical and educational debt, free college, sharply reduced incarceration, and redirected police and military funding into housing and social services. An end to America’s killer economic sanctions and military invasions that crush people around the world.

Shorter workweeks, more vacation and voting access, and a restructured financial system funded by wealth taxes and a trillion dollars of national emergency credit to a public bank. Or ten trillion dollars, not based on taxes.

Paid holidays expanded, wages raised for federal contract workers, which lifts wages for others, far more access to improved food, housing, education, health care, recreation, parks, and other communal public spaces. Doubled Social Security payouts, and at younger ages. Marijuana decriminalization with nonviolent convictions cleared, post offices transformed into free public banks, a new national bank established and freely funded ex nihilo, out of thin air, like the big private banks do for their rich buddies but not for the people, in fact against the people, to pillage and profiteer.

Many other kinds of material improvements, environmental repair, and a massive reduction of imprisonment and militarization at home and abroad. Much of this can be thought of as types of reparations. And America owes the world reparations. How else to begin to pay for this without establishing and massively crediting a national bank?

And much more needs to be done, because private business does so little for people who cannot pay the price, and often performs poorly for even those who can afford goods and services. Sooner rather than later, some serious nationalization of industry, services, and society is in order or the world will continue to burn and the people will suffer and die as always.

In Minneapolis, the brave and well-organized resistance continues to aid the besieged, the attacked, and most vulnerable. The people continue to impress with their actions and consciousness and conscience in thwarting and resisting the police state.

From the end of “The Reckoning” (the previous long post) — the people stand up — Minnesota Rising — Minneapolis Witness and Resistance:

Engaged

They come at dawn, they come at midday, they come at night. That’s when they always come. All the time. You hold your daughter tight as the boots thunder up the stairs. You worked the double shifts at the hospital for years, saving lives during the pandemic. None of that matters now. Neighborhoods, families torn apart. Apartment complexes surrounded. Schools put on lockdown – not to protect the children, but to trap them. They use children as bait! They hold kids to force parents out of hiding! The vans line the streets like a military occupation. ICE everywhere is what the regime wants – the largest domestic police force in history. Flooding every city simultaneously. Not to protect anyone. To control everyone.

In the detention centers people are stuffed in cages. Fathers separated from sons. Mothers from daughters. Human beings treated like cargo to be shipped away. The cruelty is the point.

They think fear will break us. They aim to shut us up. Instead networks form of safe houses, people with supplies – first aid, food, water, blankets, gloves, coats. Neighbors who’ve never spoken became allies. Church basements became sanctuaries. Teachers refuse to hand over attendance records. Lawyers work around the clock. Crowds chant: “No human being is illegal!” Digital networks spring up – encrypted warnings when ICE vehicles enter neighborhoods. Rapid response teams form. They come for one family, and fifteen witnesses appear with cameras. Whistles, alerts, car sirens, chants of “ICE out!”

They say they come in the name of peace and order. Pax Americana. At gunpoint. But there’s no peace in terror. No greatness in cruelty. No purity in hatred. Doctors refuse to release patient information. Bus drivers refuse to transport detainees. Workers walk off jobs at detention facilities. Resistance in the darkness, in the daylight. Thousands fill the night streets with candles and flashlights. The regime wants to flood the country with fear and violence. Instead, conscience and mutual aid pour out everywhere.

At the hospital when ICE agents show up demanding employee records, every single staff member – doctors, nurses, custodians, everyone – walks out and forms a human chain at the entrance. Let the world see what’s going on here.

They want to control the elections, the courts, the future. They forgot something. The power of the human spirit. They don’t have it. They have violence, official violence.

A young girl holds a sign reading “MY MOM IS NOT A CRIMINAL”. The resistance elders’ faces are set: “We see humanity. And we won’t look away.” Barricades of dumpsters block streets against the rampaging cops. This is not the America we were promised. This is not the America we’ll accept.

The raids continue. The resistance continues. And every morning, people make a choice: Complicity or courage. Silence or solidarity. Fear or freedom. History is here. What side are you on? Death violence and tyranny? Or life and cooperation, democracy?

What Needs to be Faced
In a White Supremacist Nation

They’re killing white people now. More obviously so. This isn’t how it is supposed to go, in a white supremacist nation.

It’s bad optics to kill white moms and white poets and white nurses, white women and white men, in a white supremacist nation.

You’re supposed to kill browns and blacks not whites out in the open. Less outcry that way, less rage, especially in the media, the white corporate media, in a white supremacist nation.

So fire the Border Patrol commander and the ICE leader for killing the wrong civilians, for killing whites and not only browns and blacks on the streets. This creates bad KPI — Key Performance Indicators — for those in charge, in a white supremacist nation.

White supremacist performance matters in a white supremacist nation.

You’re supposed to kill woke people of color and poor people of color — for media consumption, in a white supremacist nation.

Such a bad look for American capitalism, killing whites, instead of browns and blacks, per usual, in a white supremacist nation.

What the plutocrats need now on scene is a reformer, someone who can discipline the shock troops of ICE and the Border Patrol, someone who can get the troops back to killing blacks and browns, not whites, in a white supremacist nation.

Go get ‘em, Boys! Don’t kill whites — especially not middle class whites. You need to kill people of color, in a white supremacist nation. That’s what’s done. Criminals! Terrorists! Assassins! Those are the orders. In a white supremacist nation.

Proud thugs, righteous thugs, religious thugs with badges, guns, and masks, paid and blessed by the officials who serve the plutocracy, in a white supremacist nation.

Capture, entrap, assault, imprison, kill. Those are the orders, to the good ol’ Boys! All-Americans! In a white supremacist nation. Don’t be woke. Sleep all the way through. It’s a white supremacist nation.

Federal troops integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, and federal troops integrated the University of Alabama in 1963, helping black twenty-year-olds attend school there. Those federal troops stood up against incredibly vicious and violent white mobs — proud Americans, proud Christians — in a white supremacist nation.

It’s barely seventy years later and now the federal troops of ICE and the Border Patrol are on the march this time against the most vulnerable, shooting down people in the streets, like the slave patrols of old, terrorizing blacks and browns, a few whites, seizing and injuring and killing, torturing and assaulting, sexually and otherwise, imprisoning and deporting throughout the cities and states, across the entire country, because that’s what ruling officials demand in a white supremacist nation.

“From sea to shining sea,” “Manifest Destiny,” are we, in a white supremacist nation, invading and occupying city to city, the countryside too. It’s a white supremacist nation.

Sharing here throughout this post the great socialist, anti-capitalist cartoons by Art Young. Today, a century later, Mr. Fish may be his nearest successor.

Young started out as a generally apolitical Republican, but gradually became interested in left wing ideas, and by 1906 or so considered himself a socialist. He began to associate with such political leftists as John Sloan and Piet Vlag, with both of whom he would work at the radical socialist monthly The Masses. He became firmly ensconced in the radical environment of Greenwich Village after moving there in 1910. He became politically active, and by 1910, racial and sexual discrimination and the supposed injustices of the capitalist system became prevalent themes in his work. He explained these sentiments in his autobiography, Art Young: His Life and Times (1939):

“I am antagonistic to the money-making fetish because it sidetracks our natural selves, leaving us no alternative but to accept the situation and take any kind of work for a weekly wage […] We are caught and hurt by the system, and the more sensitive we are to life’s highest values the harder it is to bear the abuse.”

In an attempt to curb the “abuse” he alleged, Young ran for the New York State Assembly on the ticket of the Socialist Party of New York (part of the Socialist Party of America) in 1913, but was unsuccessful.

A good collection of some of Art Young’s cartoons at Michael Mark Cohen’s Cartooning Capitalism.

Return to Little Rock

US Army soldiers integrated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. And then in the crooked line to Minneapolis nearly seventy years later, the federal agents of ICE and the Border Patrol act like Slave Patrols — the original US police — and chase people of color through the streets of Minnesota and cities and states nationwide. That’s what happens when the plutocrat ruling class decides to enforce capitalist white supremacy in America, and in the world. It’s a much needed distraction from their pillaging to unprecedented heights of inequality. The enemy of the people is not the pillaging plutocrats, you know, it’s the impoverished people of color!

Universalize! It’s time to universalize — most everything. Socialize, nationalize, such throwback terms. Today is the day to universalize. That’s what is to be done — or bigotry will reign, and the plutocrats will continue to buy and sell people like worthless penny stocks that they keep trying to get rid of.

“News from Little Rock” shows that there are more sophisticated ways to tyrannize in America than the sheer brute gun thuggery of ICE and Border Patrol — you impoverish the most vulnerable, economically and socially, and you disinform everyone else, to create ceaseless despair and violence, chaos and powerlessness, ignorance and bigotry. You profiteer in bigoted waves, from sea to plastic choked and collapsing sea. Bigotry and tyranny, profiteering and violence, and lies should be the most commonly used words in American today, right along with democracy and health, human rights and universality — if not freedom, justice, and equality.

As Minneapolis today demonstrates, people in America remain every bit as besieged as they were in Little Rock thirty and seventy years ago. Violent rabid whites foaming at the mouth, armed, enflamed and driven by the corporate state, raging against people of color whom they insanely oppose. It’s time to take power. It’s time to end the insanity and violence and lies once and for all. Otherwise, we tolerate the demonic and live amid slave patrols, under deranged tyrants.

Insane violence, bigotry and brutality, fraud and deceit are normalized in America at the highest levels of power. It’s time to make it stop. Time to take power, and turn it all around. The violent lunatics keep talking themselves into greater and greater violence and lunacy. These are the totally debased leaders, the rich, the owners, the plutocracy — wildly out of control. They must be stripped of their money and power, as much as possible.

Otherwise they’ll go on with their brute pillaging white supremacy while lauding themselves and awarding themselves the riches of the world, while crushing everyone else and destroying the planet.

News from Little Rock

The unreported story of the 40th year commemoration of the integration of Central High School by the Little Rock Nine in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Your door is shut against my face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent.
– Claude McKay, “The White House”

What happens to a dream deferred?
…does it explode?
– Langston Hughes, “Harlem”

My days are not their days…
My ways are not their ways…
I don’t think they dare
to think of that: no:
I’m fairly certain they don’t think of that at all.
– James Baldwin, “Staggerlee wonders”

The biggest News I do not dare
Telegraph to the Editor’s chair:
“They are like people everywhere.”

The angry Editor would reply
In hundred harryings of Why
– Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” a poem that describes life in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 when Central High School became the site of the first federally-enforced court-ordered school integration.

In 1997, forty years after Gwendolyn Brooks published her famous poem in the partisan Black newspaper The Chicago Defender about Black life in white Empire and the lynching white terrorists who, along with the white state officials, fought against education and integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, US President Bill Clinton returned to his home state to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the integration of Central High School by the Little Rock Nine, while essentially ignoring the poverty and resultant violence in the area, alongside the equally impervious and imperious Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee — Baptist minister — and Trump’s current American ambassador to Israel, since 2025, during today’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.

In the first three days of President Clinton’s four day stay in Little Rock, four young men aged 17 to 23 were murdered in Little Rock not far from Central High School – an outbreak of violence that had been foreshadowed less than two months earlier by a drive-by shooting near Central High that was the third such shooting in a five-day period which also saw the killings of four other youths. The murders and poverty went virtually unreported, as usual. The slain – Brian Young, 19; Derrick Mcbride, 17; Jamarco Woods, 23; Melvin Morning, 23; Mark Green, 26; Shameka Moore, 16; Antoine Harris, 18; Tony Davis, 20.

News From Little Rock
(original post)

Historical the print deluge
not once before nor since so huge –
the President preached claimed he cared –
emotion trite and tripe none spared

at Central High in Little Rock
where justice first was forced and won.
Reporters praised in nonstop talk
the proud returning native son –

so sanguine suave a specious bit
on stage displayed – adorned bright lit –
sleek mugging presidential tears
for racial gains of forty years.

He harkened to the Mayflower –
he mentioned Ellis Island too.
To sanction patriotic power
he flung around clichés half true.

He lauded then the Little Rock Nine –
and rightly so their story told
how brave they crossed the color line
thus much deserving glory bold –

but spoke no word at Central’s door
about reversing flight from poor
though wealth had fled from center town –
of monied flight he’d not talk down.

The city splashed fresh paint around
to try to make the streets look swell –
a surface fix meant to confound
to fool the cameras fool them well.

II.

To see this dog and pony show –
the community house would not go –
avoided by its radio crew
whose workers shrugged refused the view –

no steadfast earnest union troupe –
to delta scattered far and back –
no ACORN no New Party group
no sign of four young men dead black –

forgotten buried shunned no shock
four young men killed near Central’s block
that noble week in Little Rock –
those joyous days in Little Rock.

III.

The Governor proud too proved lost
explaining what his daughter wrote
on visit to a holocaust
memorial – these words of note –

“Why didn’t somebody do something?”
she simply marked and then again –
“Why didn’t somebody do something?” –
young poignant words from poignant pen.

The gov’nor declared – “In silence
we left and I knew she got it.”
Then as if in prayer – calm intense –
he offered up this plaintive bit –

“I hope that never does someone
have to ask why didn’t someone
‘do something’.” He meant it too.
You might wonder if he truly knew

four young folk died – one week alone –
a mere few blocks right down the street.
He spoke as if he’d never known –
as if some facts he would not meet.

IV.

Reporters none walked down old streets
to hear how people wish to live.
So busy hugging loud elites
the mainstream news could no one give

to ring a bell or knock a door
to sit on porch and learn the score
to gather round a kitchen plate
a living room and there relate.

Though folks might raise concerns cold blunt –
by asking wise reporters could
in lively talk without affront
learn far more than they thought they would –

real word collect – of dire import –
upfront street tales fresh thought live wit –
true human needs and cares – in short –
a worthy text no PR skit.

Of news like this the press won’t dare –
keen poet Gwendolyn Brooks once found
exactly forty years from where
those young folks died near Central’s ground.

Disaster there ignored by all –
remember this – take time recall –
proud polis papers president –
how much we care quite evident.

The press not much the world reveals
with cheap words clever false appeals.
Much life that matters now – forget.
Most news goes elsewhere – no regret –

or slants twists lies omits distorts –
by corporate will – sheer force – directs
slick chatter from sleek ruling courts
thus base and gullible infects.

The economic system fails
to fill life’s gaps – it fills grim jails
as corporate suits work to disguise
the coins they steal from dead men’s eyes.

Neglect that which small profit gives –
elected representatives –
owned by vast wealth – are sternly told.
Despair and trouble soon unfold.

VI.

The president preached claimed he cared –
emotion trite and tripe none spared
so sanguine suave a specious bit
on stage displayed – adorned bright lit –

slick mugging presidential tears
for racial pains of forty years
four young men dead – news took a walk
while vapid presidential talk

engulfed those gathered all around
where media intent were found
to note each smile and mark each frown
but made no note of death downtown.

From neighborhoods our eyes we turn –
so many killed such slight concern –
forgotten buried shunned no shock –
unmentioned by official talk

that noble week in Little Rock.
Forgotten buried – wonder why –
four young men killed near Central High
that joyous week in Little Rock.