Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
O secretário de Transportes dos EUA, Pete Buttigieg, anunciou na semana passada US$ 94 milhões em concessões para financiar 59 projetos de tecnologia de cidades inteligentes em todo o país.
Apesar da resistência generalizada e crescente contra os sistemas biométricos …
The post Críticos alertam para ‘uma rede de vigilância’ à medida que os EUA avançam com planos para cidades mais ‘inteligentes’ appeared first on Global Research.
“What we approved today won’t raise electricity costs by even an ‘agora’ for the public,” stated Energy Minister Israel Katz.
By World Israel News Staff
Israel’s government on Sunday approved the first phase of a national program for energy storage that would include a pilot facility for “kosher electricity.”
Orthodox Jews do not turn on electricity on the Sabbath or on Jewish festivals, in observance of Torah law.
The Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, communities – as opposed to more moderate religious Jews, who rely on timers – are opposed to methods that would likely involve other Jews in producing that electricity. Instead, many use generators, which are unsafe and more costly than regular electricity, and for many years their leaders have been seeking a better solution.
Following the November 1st national election, this type of energy-storage plan was included in the coalition agreement between the United Torah Judaism party and Likud.
The program, however, will cost roughly NIS 120 million ($33 million).
In an interview with Hebrew-language Ynet, Dr. Amit Mor, CEO of Eco-Energy, a strategic economic consultant and a senior lecturer at Reichman University, explained why he believes it is necessary.
“Since the 1980s, if you walk around on Shabbat in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, you hear the noise of diesels. They burn very expensive, very polluting and smelly diesel,” he said.
More important, he stressed, is the danger involved, especially to children, who could be burned or electrocuted.
Israel Beitenu party leader Avigdor Liberman, a harsh critic of both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and haredim, slammed the proposal on Twitter.
“While the citizens of Israel are collapsing under the price increases and the cost of living continues to soar, what is the main thing that Netanyahu brings to the cabinet meeting this morning? Kosher electricity” he wrote.
“The establishment of the storage facilities involves a huge investment of billions of shekels….
“One of the most important components in those facilities is a metal called lithium, the most expensive in the world. All this expenditure will be passed on through the electricity tariff to all consumers in the State of Israel.
“According to all the calculations I tried to do, the full deployment of kosher electricity throughout the country, something that is clear to all of us that we will reach when the time comes, including the production and transmission of the electricity will cost at least 90 billion NIS, i.e. 10,000 NIS per citizen. It is clear to all of us that the one who will finance it, is the same middle class, the same people who serve in the IDF, make reserves, work and pay taxes.
“This is not a fight against the cost of living, it is the creation and worsening of the cost of living. You are tired of being cut off. Take responsibility and resign,” he concluded.
Energy Minister Israel Katz said the program would not cost the Israeli public even a single agora – one one-hundredth of a shekel; rather, it would “facilitate the production of electricity in low-demand times to provide it at high-demand ones, including to Haredi neighborhoods.”
The storage facility, in fact, would be “profitable,” he said.
“According to the decision, which is in the opinion of all the professional parties, the Electricity Authority will formulate the horizontal regulation (regulation) for ‘Kosher Electricity’ and the pilot of the Electricity Company, so that there will be no increase in the electricity tariff as a result of these moves,” the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure stated.
The pilot program will be launched in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, a suburb of Tel Aviv.
The post ‘Kosher electricity’ pilot program: Liberman slams religious Jews, claims ‘working Israelis’ will foot the bill appeared first on World Israel News.
Westerners, too, are “shocked” by the sentence – but not for the same reason as Ahmed Khalef.
By Hugh Fitzgerald, FrontPage Magazine
The steep increase in the incidence of rapes in France is entirely a result of the rise in Muslim migrants from North Africa. Fifty percent of the crimes in Paris are now committed by “foreigners” – overwhelmingly maghrébins; in France’s second city, Marseille, 55 percent of crimes are committed by “foreigners,” also overwhelmingly maghrébins.
Muslims make up 9% of the population in France, but 70% of those who have been imprisoned for rape. They do not think they have done wrong; their French victims, after all, are Infidels, and their dress and mien are regarded by Muslims as come-hither invitations to sexual encounters.
An Algerian just convicted of rape at knifepoint by a Paris court was shocked at the verdict of 26 months in prison, astonished that someone as genuinely decent as himself could be punished for this slight infraction. His story can be found here: “‘I came to France to build a future’ – Algerian migrant who raped woman at knifepoint ‘shocked’ to be handed 26-month prison sentence,” by John Cody, Remix News, April 25, 2023:
After 35-year-old Algerian migrant Ahmed Khalef was convicted of raping a woman who was waiting for a tram in the French city of Bègles, he argued that he is a “good person” and that he was “shocked” at the length of his prison sentence.
“I am a good person,” said Khalef in court. On Monday, April 24, the Assize Court of Gironde found him guilty of rape under the threat of a weapon and violence against a person holding public authority.
However, he claimed not to “understand anything. I am shocked to find myself here and in prison for 26 months when I came to France to build a future.”
Yes, we, too, are “shocked” by the sentence – just a bit more than two years in prison for “rape under threat with a weapon” — but not for the same reason as Ahmed Khalef. We are shocked because we would expect at least a 10-year sentence; in some American states, rape in the first degree can bring a sentence of life imprisonment. But Ahmed Khalef, in Ahmed Khalef’s view, is “a good person.” He thinks 26 months is far too long a sentence.
Ahmed Khalef told the court in Gironde that he is deeply disappointed: He’s confused. He cannot understand why he should have received such a “harsh” sentence. After all, he “came to France to build a future.”
What kind of “future” do you think he had in mind? He is not an asylum seeker – there is no persecution or war in Algeria for him to have fled — but an economic migrant. He was hoping to “build a future” not through his own work, but based on the cornucopia of benefits the generous French welfare state provides: free or greatly subsidized housing, free medical care, free education (including language classes), unemployment benefits, and more. That is the future Ahmed Khalef was “building,” like millions of other Muslim migrants to France, by draining the French treasury of monies that could otherwise have gone to help the French poor and elderly, and even possibly be sufficient to allow the French to keep their retirement age of 62 years.
Note that Ahmed Khalef says nothing about being gainfully employed. Had he been, he would certainly have mentioned it at trial, as a point in his favor. His silence on this score undoubtedly means that, like many Muslim migrants in France, he was unemployed.
The case he was convicted for dates back to 2021. On Feb. 20 of that year, he approached a 20-year-old woman who was waiting for tram C at the Parc Mussonville stop in Bègles.
She became suspicious of the man and moved in front of the tram’s CCTV cameras, according to a report from French news outlet Sud Ouest. This did not deter Khalef, who pressed a knife into her back, dragged her into a park, and then proceeded to rape her by force.
Police had already been called to the scene after witnesses to the incident became concerned about the woman. The victim, who was in a state of shock, saw police walking with flashlights in the park and reported the incident to them.
A little earlier, his attacker had already set his sights on two young 18-year-old passengers by groping them and insulting them in Arabic.
The police indicated that when they moved in to arrest the perpetrator, he began biting his tongue, spitting blood at them, and resisting arrest; he then hit an officer on his nose, resulting in an injury.
Khalef, who said he is an “only son” among seven sisters, told the court he is “a normal person” to whom his parents “gave a good education.”
Khalef may have been “a normal person” in Algeria, where women who are not Islamically correct in their clothing can be considered as fair game for male sexual predators, but in civilized France, his behavior is not that of “a normal person.”
As to that “good education” he claims his parents made sure he received, what does he mean? Was he taught useful skills that would make him employable? If so, why did he not find a job in France? Or didn’t he bother to look for work, preferring to receive the full panoply of welfare benefits instead?
He’s “shocked” to be treated in such a cruel and unfeeling manner. When he arrived in France, he expected to receive all kinds of benefits. And when he needed sexual release, he thought he’d take his pleasure with a French girl. He failed to understand that Infidel women are not to be treated, as the Pakistani groomers in the U.K. call them, as “easy meat.”
It’s all been a cultural misunderstanding. How can the French judges be so unfeeling when this was not at all what poor Ahmed Khalef, a self-described “good person,” ever expected? And doesn’t that 26 months in prison for acting as Muslim men understandably will act with women who are asking for it, such as this 20-year-old Infidel woman, seem awfully harsh? Does that sentence seem fair?
Where is the justice that the French are so proud of? Could his sentence be, alas, one more example of Islamophobia?
The post ‘I’m a good person’: In France, Muslim migrant rapist shocked at his sentence appeared first on World Israel News.
The Israeli president shook hands with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Omani Crown Prince Theyazin bin Haitham Al Said.
By TPS
President Isaac Herzog mingled with an array of national leaders, including those from a string of Arab countries, at a reception at Buckingham Palace on the sidelines of King Charles III’s coronation in London this weekend.
Israel’s head of state connected with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Bahrain’s Crown Prince/Prime Minister Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Princess Lalla Meryem of Morocco.
Herzog also shook hands with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Omani Crown Prince Theyazin bin Haitham Al Said, whose countries do not have diplomatic ties with the Jewish state.
Charles commended Herzog on his efforts to mediate between Israel’s government and opposition over the proposed overhaul of the judicial system.
The president and his wife, Michal, also met with First Lady Jill Biden, who was representing the United States at the coronation. Michal Herzog spoke with Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Herzog previously met with Charles shortly after becoming president in 2021 and then saw him again at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral last year.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu published a statement Saturday night extending “wholehearted congratulations” from him and his wife, Sara, along with “the entire people of Israel” to Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla.
“May it mark the further strengthening of the deep bond between our two nations,” the premier’s missive read.
For the first time in a country where fewer than half of the population now defines themselves as Christian, the coronation ceremony included representatives of the Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh faiths, as well as female clergy.
Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis was invited to spend the night at St. James’s Palace with his wife in order to avoid desecration at the Sabbath-day ceremony. For the same reason, the Herzogs walked to the Westminster Abbey coronation ceremony from a nearby residence.
Charles was anointed with oil from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, a part of the ceremony deemed so sacred it was concealed behind screens.
The King’s grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, is buried in Jerusalem. She is recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations for saving a Greek Jewish widow and two of her children.
The post Herzog meets with Arab leaders on sidelines of Charles III’s coronation appeared first on World Israel News.
A placard for Take Back Alberta seen on a van, as convoys from all over Alberta gathered in opposition to COVID-19 mandates during the “Alberta Wide Freedom Convoy – No More Mandates” protest outside the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton, Canada, May 14, 2022. (Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Alberta’s provincial election campaign features a showdown between outgoing United Conservative Party (UCP) premier Danielle Smith’s hard-right populist politics, and New Democratic Party (NDP) leader and former premier Rachel Notley’s center-left politics. This will be the first real test of Smith’s electoral viability since her predecessor, Jason Kenney, was turfed by the UCP for being insufficiently right-wing.
A key player in Kenney’s demise and Smith’s leadership win is an organization called Take Back Alberta (TBA), which is registered as a third-party advertiser — essentially a Canadian political action committee (PAC). But calling TBA a PAC doesn’t do justice to its organizing prowess and the dangers it poses to the social fabric. The group is filling town halls all over the province, seizing on the alienation many feel after three years of pandemic confusion and uncertainty.
Its message is simple — no more pandemic restrictions, no more vaccine mandates, no to online voting, and yes to radical health care reforms, thus paving the way for privatized health care in the province. With Smith in charge, the group is in the process of seizing the UCP machinery and purging it of any remnants of Kenney’s influence.
TBA sent hundreds of delegates to the party’s annual general meeting — weeks after Smith was elected leader — to vote a slate of its candidates to the nine vacancies on the party’s board of directors. All of them won. With eighteen board positions, including the premier, TBA has a majority on the board, allowing it to play a prominent role in shaping the party’s policies.
The group, which claims to have thirty thousand members, has also taken over local constituency associations in several ridings, or districts. One longtime conservative said that TBA’s outsized presence at her local constituency association meeting “felt like a coup,” noting a palpable hostility in the air toward old-guard members like herself. In a highly symbolic development, Eric Bouchard, a candidate who appears to share TBA’s positions, is running for the UCP in Kenney’s old district, which the former premier vacated last year.
The group was born out of the Coutts blockade, which saw militant anti-vaxxers block the Coutts border crossing with Montana in solidarity with the so-called Freedom Convoy that took over Ottawa, the nation’s capital, in late January and February 2022. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canada’s equivalent of the FBI, raided trailers near the blockade, where they found a cache of weapons, ammo, and body armor. A seized plate carrier included two patches associated with Diagolon, a militia movement that seeks to create a white ethnostate running in a diagonal line from northern British Columbia to Florida.
The raid led to the arrest of fourteen individuals, four of whom were charged with conspiracy to murder an RCMP officer, while others were charged with lesser offenses. One of those arrested was Fort Macleod town councilor Marco Van Huigenbos, who was charged with mischief. He is also a TBA organizer.
Online news site PressProgress unearthed a February 2022 video of Danielle Smith — who at the time was still a conspiracy theorist broadcaster and corporate lobbyist — expressing her hope that the Coutts blockaders would “win” against supposed encroachment from the federal government. Rob Anderson, who became Smith’s top advisor, is also in the video, calling the blockade a “beautiful thing.”
At the same time, Kenney was calling on the blockaders to go home. One month later, a leaked audio recording revealed Kenney referring to his opponents within the party who opposed the fact that he implemented COVID restrictions at all (however reluctantly) as “kooky people” who held “extreme, hateful, intolerant, bigoted and crazy views.” In the minds of those who opposed COVID restrictions, this made him no better than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called convoy participants a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views.”
TBA founder David Parker, a former Kenney staffer with deep connections to the Canadian conservative establishment that he rails against, also worked for Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. Parker leveraged the furor over the blockade and Kenney’s response to it as a recruitment opportunity. In a discussion on a podcast he cohosts, Parker said Kenney’s COVID restrictions on religious gatherings were the catalyst for TBA’s foundation:
My creed is very simple. I have one rule. Don’t mess with my friends. And underneath that is an even deeper rule. Never mess with my family. And when you arrest pastors you’re messing with both my friends and my family. So then it’s very simple, now I must act in a way that will show people that that rule cannot be violated without consequences.
Parker’s vendetta against Kenney is personal. By contrast, Parker has described Smith as a “friend” who shares his “passions.” Smith attended Parker’s March wedding to a blogger for a far-right news site. With a sympathetic ear in government, TBA is moving from advocating against COVID policies to defeating what Parker has called the NDP’s “toxic and disease-ridden ideology” and its “destructive socialist agenda.”
Media interest in TBA has been considerable since Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell first noted the group’s organizing prowess in a column after it flooded attendance at the UCP annual general meeting. In most of his public appearances, Parker insists he has no ulterior motive — he just wants ordinary people to get involved in politics. “Your democratic system is not broken. You are,” Parker told a rally near Alberta’s third-largest city, Lethbridge. “Democracies don’t work when citizens don’t show up.” At a recruitment meeting in Westlock, a small northern Alberta town, Parker said he wants supporters to know that “if they start to show up, things can change.”
TBA’s organization efforts operate on a points system, with each member expected to accumulate ten points. Supporters get one point for convincing someone between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, or someone who doesn’t care about politics, to vote, and two points for convincing someone to change their vote from the NDP to UCP. Its fundraising goals are similarly ambitious. TBA wants to have ten thousand members paying $4 a month and ninety-nine businesses paying $500 a month, which would net the group more than $1 million a year.
While TBA presents itself as a purely grassroots phenomenon, the group is not exactly an anarchist collective. Its operations are overseen by a small vanguard of regional organizers, or captains, recruited by Parker, many of whom view him as a prophetic figure. TBA Edmonton captain Vince Byfield — the son of Ted Byfield, publisher of the influential neoconservative Alberta Report magazine — described his first encounter with Parker as “a sign from God.” Calgary captain Roy Beyer has described the Alberta election as “ground zero” in spiritual warfare against the “globalists.”
Through all the theocratically tinged rhetoric, it’s easy to forget that TBA is giving people who feel discarded by the political system a sense of collective purpose. As reporter Carrie Tait wrote in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national paper of record:
TBA is more complex than a classroom preparing pupils to sit on boards or vote for leaders. It is a community for people who feel ostracized by the political class for their Christian beliefs and social conservative leanings. It is modelled after multilevel marketing schemes, which can have sprawling reach and, at their most successful, thrive without much effort from the top.
This notion of a band of outsiders searching for a sense of belonging is key to understanding TBA’s appeal, and, indeed, is something that should resonate with anyone living through the depredations and difficulty of daily life in late stage capitalism.
Parker’s noxious views aside, there are some lessons here for the Left that have been entirely ignored by the NDP, which is taking the approach of US president Joe Biden in presenting itself as a steady hand in contrast to Smith and TBA’s radicalism. While TBA supports Smith, Parker entertains the possibility of turning against her in the event she transgresses the group’s agenda. TBA’s takeover of the party’s board was one way to avoid that outcome, and the move holds Smith accountable, ensuring she doesn’t take its support for granted. The Left could benefit by taking a page out of this resolute and committed playbook.
Parker and TBA understand that politics isn’t just about electing the lesser evil. It’s about mobilizing people to get involved in the issues they care about and helping them seize the levers of power. If Smith wins the election on May 29, she will have her TBA army’s organizational prowess to thank.
Nurses rally at Pottstown Memorial Medical Center, July 12, 2017 in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. (Reading Eagle: Tim Leedy / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images)
In the decades since publishing her first book, the memoir Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, veteran organizer Jane McAlevey has become a singular figure in the labor movement. She has written four books on labor, all focused on tactics and strategies to organize mass numbers of new workers into unions that wage mass strikes to fight employers, in order to revive organized labor’s flagging fortunes. She regularly comments on labor for national and international outlets, and she’s continued to work on a wide range of union fights throughout the United States and the world, both individual campaigns and in her “Organizing for Power” online training course taken by thousands of workers across the world.
Her latest book, coauthored with Abby Lawlor, is called Rules to Win by: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations. In it, McAlevey and Lawlor focus on mass-participation union contract negotiations with an eye toward engaging mass numbers of workers in those negotiations to force bosses to give unions what they want. The book focuses on several campaign case studies, including several that McAlevey herself worked on.
In a guest-hosted episode of the podcast the Dig, recorded at a public event at the People’s Forum in New York City on March 25, 2023, Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht spoke to McAlevey about her life and work. You can listen to the episode here. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Micah Uetricht
Before we get into your new book and any of your work, let’s start at the beginning. You write in your books about a history of coming from a political family and being a student organizer at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and working for a while in the environmental movement and politics, but you eventually ended up in the labor movement. On a more existential level, I’m curious: How did Jane McAlevey, the labor organizer, globe-trotting the planet spreading the methods that we’re going to be talking about in a minute, come to be such a person?
Jane McAlevey
I am the daughter of a World War II fighter pilot. I think that the high-risk gene came a little bit from my old man, rest in peace. He wound up being the wingman to the ace in the German theater and made it home alive. I reflect a lot on being the daughter of a successful fighter pilot who fought fascists — I think it is not an accident.
There was no concept of something being too risky in my childhood, whether it was my brothers throwing me off of giant rocks or anything else. And then my father became a politician by the time I was born, so I was born into a very political household. He didn’t have a clear ideology, except justice. And he took a lot of risks in public office in the 1960s and ’70s. This had a huge influence on me. He actually knitted together racial justice and zoning laws, and fought for the first Earth Day and flew the Earth Day flag over the public office building.
He was mayor, then supervisor, then chair of the supervisors, all in Rockland County, New York. He created a zoning policy that went to the Supreme Court — it got rejected by the court, but everyone in zoning-law cases still studies it, because it’s essentially the precursor to smart growth. He’s credited with the first zoning laws that built public housing, that got me beat up in elementary school all the time for bringing black people out of the city into the country.
The zoning laws were called “controlled growth.” They taxed developers, and the developers went to war against us. My father actually figured it out, because he came out of a strong building-trades family: he had to bring the building-trades unions together in coalition to build the first public housing in the New York suburbs, for which there was extraordinary controversy.
That lineage, and a mother who died when I was very young, meant that I was my father’s campaign attaché on posters, on bumper stickers — the proverbial baby he was kissing a lot of the time. I had a crazy pack of siblings who had to raise me, because he was never home. I was either his campaign attaché, or I didn’t see him. I was raised by a pack of great wolves. So I think that is sort of the roots of like, knowing that methods mattered. And understanding that you couldn’t pass public policy if you couldn’t win the campaign; knowing that you couldn’t pass public policy, even if you narrowly won the campaign. You had to win the campaign and then you had to keep the power, and then you had to divide and conquer your opposition, which my father was doing constantly.
Micah Uetricht
There were a range of progressive causes that you could have gone — and did go — into besides the labor movement, but you’ve dedicated the bulk of your working life to the labor movement. Why labor in particular?
Jane McAlevey
Oh my god, because there is no other way. All of the work we do matters in the progressive movement, but we live in something called capitalism. It took me ten years of being in the environmental justice movement, the student movement, the peace movement, to realize that in a country without real democracy, the one thing that the employer class will respond to is when all the workers walk off the job and create a crisis. That, at the end of the day, is the most effective way to challenge unfettered corporate power.
While I think all the issues matter, the foundation of power that is required for the rest of our issue-driven movements to succeed is a strong labor movement.
The foundation of power that is required for the rest of our issue-driven movements to succeed is a strong labor movement.
I’m concerned with something called structure-based power. Obviously, the black church is a different kind of institution. But [in organizing through the church, organizers have] the ability to measure your power and know whether or not you’re ready to have the kind of fight that you need to have. That’s why, after being in the environmental justice movement, I lived in the South at the Highlander Center, where I was sort of doing a lot of the anti-toxics work. Early on, I learned a lot about the labor movement in the civil rights movement by being in the South, in a famous movement institution.
The Highlander Center in Tennessee was the official labor education center of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and ’40s. It’s better known for being an education center of the US civil rights movement a couple of decades later. When I had the pleasure of first moving there to work, I was set up in the library, because there was no office space for me. I was in my mid-twenties. I started to go into the archives, and that was the first time I saw organizing manuals from the CIO and realized, “Oh my God, it’s always been the labor movement in the civil rights movement. These have always been inseparable movements.”
Micah Uetricht
You joined the labor movement at a time when, on the American left and the global left, it wasn’t really the hip thing — it wasn’t where people thought the action was. The labor movement was seen as moribund. The story is a little different now. But when you started in the labor movement, there was a sense of dynamism missing. But you’re saying you looked at both arguably the two most important social movements in the history of the United States, and you realize that that’s indeed where the action is.
Jane McAlevey
Yeah, and I was not, for obvious reasons, going to be a leader in the black church movement. I would say, actually, in all the organizing work I do, I’ve never stopped connecting the two. And as someone who does not practice faith, I’ve spent a hell of a lot of time inside the organized black church with the rank-and-file members of unions in every single fight, because in nearly every campaign I’ve ever run, helping members identify an additional source of power in their lives is fundamental, and the black church has been key to many of those struggles in my lifetime and every campaign.
Micah Uetricht
You’ve written four books now, and throughout those four books, you make your organizing strategies and philosophy very clear, but in the spirit of sort of crisp, quick communication, I want to take a stab at what McAleveyism is as a whole.
The thread that runs throughout the four books is that workers themselves have the power to organize and force significant concessions not only from their bosses, but from society as a whole. But because our current political environment is one that’s so hostile to collective action by workers, workers can only win by 1) taking militant action in overwhelming numbers together, and 2) simultaneously using every bit of leverage they possess, which means using the ties that they possess outside the workplace, in their communities, as well as in the workplace itself.
And the only way that they can do either of those things is through very rigorous internal processes of building toward serious action — what you refer to in all of your books as structure tests — and scaling up those tests until you’re at the level where you can pull off a mass strike, or even more. If workers can do that, they not only can beat their bosses, but transform all of society.
Am I missing anything that you would add to your definition of what McAleveyism is?
Jane McAlevey
It has to be fun.
I think the one piece that I would add: the methods I was taught were about building worksite power, and then additionally, thinking about how workers come to see themselves as powerful actors inside of their communities. And you knit that power together — we should just say that it’s radical political education. The point of it all is to help everyday people connect the dots in their own lives about things that enable them to have confidence, because confidence is one of the most important things the working class needs in order to act.
Confidence is one of the most important things the working class needs in order to act.
What’s missing is that the methods carried out by those of us who continue to win (not always, but often) and win big (not always, but a lot) are part of helping everyday workers come to have more self-confidence in their capacity to win on the way to a big strike, or on the way to believing they can elect a great mayor. We are here to help people connect the dots. And if we’re not doing radical political education as we’re doing the organizing work, we’re doing something wrong.
Micah Uetricht
The thread that goes through all of your work and is very present in the new book, Rules to Win By, is that nothing can be accomplished without workers themselves taking action together. You’re somebody who comes into these campaigns as a staffer, an organizer from outside the workplace. But the whole point of your methods is to actually generate worker engagement, and you say repeatedly in all your books that nothing can be won if the workers themselves are not taking action: and not just that the workers themselves, but a majority, and not just a majority, but a supermajority of workers are taking action together.
The number that always comes up in your books is 90 percent — the goal is for 90 percent of workers to get on board to take this action together, which seems to me to indicate a kind of radical democratic belief on your part. We’re at a time of extreme polarization in the United States and around the world; to insist that it’s possible to win 90 percent of people over to anything is kind of an incredible claim. If we’re to believe what you’ve written about the case studies that you participated in and others who have used your methods, 90 percent is actually an achievable number. Can you talk about that kind of belief, and how you make that 90 percent possible?
Jane McAlevey
By actually laying it out to the workers from day one in every campaign. A sense of radical transparency in the conversation is a key part of the work. There is this return to this crazy, I think often absurd, discussion in the United States on the Left about the role of a full-time organizer, what some people call the professional organizer, versus rank-and-file leaders. It’s the most absurd discussion that we engage in. The way that workers come to win is by having organizers, and that could be full-time or not, in the workplace or not, but skilled people.
The point is, organizing is a craft and power-building is a craft. When it comes to organizing there’s this idea that anyone can just stand up and do it. On the one hand, you can. I have the most incredible belief in the capacity of every single person to act. But you wouldn’t hire someone who’s never held a hammer to build your house the first time. So building the kind of power required to get to 90 percent or more among tens of thousands of people isn’t something that you’re going to hand to someone who’s never tried to do it.
But I say in every book: if you don’t actually believe that everyday people can learn how to do this and learn how to do it quickly, you’re in the wrong movement. Because everyone can organize. We just can’t assume that they can do it without someone helping them understand the basic steps and the basic methods. That’s what a craft is by definition, is something that you get better at, and better at and better at every time you do it.
A lot of rank-and-file leaders who have never been full-time organizers the way I have are extraordinary leaders, because they’ve been in it for a while. They know the work because they’ve been through a strike or two or ten. And they’re just as good as or not better than anybody.
Everyone can organize. We just can’t assume that they can do it without someone helping them understand the basic steps and the basic methods.
So you have to start a conversation with workers. Everything has to be totally honest. I’ve never kidded them: “I’m here for a little while, and my job is to get you as good at this as I possibly can as fast as I possibly can, because I’m not going to be around. So what I’m going to do is teach you every single thing I’ve ever learned. And I’m going to do that with a curriculum in my head. I’m going to teach you step-by-step in a way that’s going to make sense to you. And I’m going to do it with thousands of workers and struggle.”
There’s a series of steps that we move through to help people learn and build their confidence. That sort of mental curriculum of the organizer, which ebbs and flows just like a good teacher in a classroom, has to start with being open, honest, transparent. For people who don’t know it in the United States, in the private sector, we are not even allowed in the facility.
When I sit down with workers, and they have a list of things that they want to win, the first thing I say to them is, “That’s super exciting. You and your coworkers are so deserving of that. Here’s what it’s going to take. It’s going to take you building 90 percent unity across this entire workplace, and knowing and letting the boss know that you’re at least 90 percent unity and are ready to make the kinds of victories on the demands that you’re making, and never being anything but brutally honest about that from day one.”
Micah Uetricht
It seems also like the 90 percent figure and the methods that are about building these supermajorities come not only from believing that you can get 90 percent of the workplace on board, but also the incredibly hostile climate that workers operate under in the United States, which is something like an authoritarian regime when workers punch in on the job every day.
In the very beginning of this book, the first page of Rules to Win By, you tell an anecdote from a campaign in which you get in an elevator and are physically confronted and actually sexually assaulted by some pretty nasty dudes. They are hired union-busting goons, and their intention was to draw a reaction from you that would hurt the campaign. This is the kind of environment and these are the kinds of people that these petty authoritarian employers in the United States are using: they not only restrict your ability to have any kind of democratic say on the job, but also they hire thugs to confront union organizers in elevators and assault them.
So the 90 percent seems like a number that is necessary to overcome that and carry out democracy in an authoritarian regime.
Jane McAlevey
The important thing about that opening story is that the union buster had been doing what he did to me in the elevator to dozens of nurses. He had actually been intimidating, and sexually intimidating, viciously. That campaign was the four years I spent in Nevada, which is a hell of a state with incredible workers in it. And what happened with that union buster is really what goes on in the United States: he’d wait at the time clock for workers at shift change, then walk right next to them to their cars in a dark parking lot. Then he leaned against their car and put his arm on the door to try to force the nurse to have a conversation with him.
The episode I tell about being locked in an elevator with him — all of which was litigated — was remarkable, but not remarkable at all. This is true at Amazon, Starbucks, and everywhere else. This stuff is not new. In the old days, it was done with Pinkertons and guns.
By the way, the for-profit hospital sector in Nevada mattered because it was the single highest source of income for every single for-profit hospital chain in America. The power analysis took us a little while to figure out: Why did they care so much? Because in Nevada, and in the Las Vegas casinos in particular, forty-four million people fly in every year to gamble. Every single person is out of network on their insurance plan. So it mattered so much. It was their own little mini Amazon or something, if you were the for-profit hospital industry. That kind of terror campaign led to us winning workers in that particular moment in that election.
Then the employer, within the seven required days under labor law, filed charges against us, saying that Jane McAlevey and a few other people have personally intimidated every worker to vote yes for the union after being assaulted in an elevator by them. So then we had to actually go on and litigate it and win.
If you want to win something really big, under an authoritarian-like regime . . . which is sadly, the state of Florida, Texas, if you’re a woman in the United States at this point, a black person, it’s always been like functioning under an authoritarian regime. So for people who think that they can just tweet, or hold meetings and have the same forty people show up at every meeting, that that’s going to get us to the kind of power required to challenge what is going on in this country and in this world — it’s really not just magical thinking, it’s bad thinking.
Micah Uetricht
Rules to Win by is mostly about union negotiations. It’s specifically about an approach of yours called “open negotiations.” I didn’t really understand until I read this book, that the point of open negotiations for you is not just to throw open the doors to all union members in a given unit to join in, and maybe you’ll be more powerful because the boss sees that there’s more workers than they expected there. That’s part of it.
But really, the point of such open negotiations is to see contract negotiations as an opportunity to involve as many workers as possible, and to maximize all of the points of leverage that each of those workers bring to the table and involve them in multiple parts of the negotiations process.
In doing so, you don’t just win a stronger contract; you’re building (or rebuilding, in the case of a moribund union) that kind of supermajority worker power that we were just talking about, which can be then taken and used elsewhere within the union and beyond the union. Can you talk a little bit about that strategy of open negotiations and why they’re so important to everything that you argue for in this new book?
Jane McAlevey
I believe you have to put workers at the center of everything. So this book focuses on how we put workers at the center of the negotiations process. (If I get to it, there’ll be another book about how to put workers at the center of power-structure analysis. The more that workers understand, and the more they bring their actual intelligence to the table, because they come with extraordinary intelligence, the better off everyone is going to be.)
The more that workers understand, and the more they bring their actual intelligence to the table, the better off everyone is going to be.
In Nevada, there were a couple of places where we had a moribund unit, a dead union functionally, with twenty workers out of a thousand who were paying dues. That was a shocking thing for me to go from the comfort zone of the Northeast — at a time when everyone paid dues into the union that they’re a part of in non-right-to-work states — to the Wild West of the Southwest.
We were in the first two campaigns for meeting with workers who basically hated their union. Most of them wouldn’t join it, wouldn’t sign a membership card, thought it was a ridiculous organization. Not corrupt, just stupid.
To help them overcome their skepticism, and to help them really understand that the union was just them and their coworkers collectivizing their power against their employer, I was often battling with the longtime people there to say, “We’re actually going to let anybody come into the room who’s represented by the collective bargaining agreement.” That pivot was instrumental to us actually building a 90 percent union in a right-to-work state.
Micah Uetricht
It sounds like you’re also describing it as a kind of recruitment opportunity for those who are not currently engaged in the union, or are even anti-union. There’s plenty of stories about that in the book. You bring these anti-union workers into this process, you show them what you are building and what a union looks like, and that the union is something they should want to be a part of, because they see how dynamic it is, and how it’s a force for them to change their life on the job.
Jane McAlevey
There’s this rhetoric in the labor movement: “The ‘u’ in union stands for ‘you.’” Yet most unions haven’t made that real. So how do you make the “u” in union real to people? You involve them and put them at the center of the most important decisions in their own organization.
Generally, for workers, the most important part of their union that they decided to form or join or be part of, is their contract. What their wages are, what their terms and conditions are, how they get out of living in an authoritarian dictatorship called the employment sector of the United States. It’s not telling workers they are the union, it’s actually enabling them to be their own union.
When you open up the negotiations process, you don’t just invite all the workers covered by the contract — you demand their presence. We set a goal of trying to get every single worker, once. Electing a big committee is part of it. There is a sitting committee, and it’s much larger than what most unions in the United States engage in. There’s a standing committee that’s representative, every kind of worker, every kind of shift — they bring incredible intelligence to the meeting.
There is no way that any trade-union leader can tell me that having a ton of workers from every shift in every kind of work in the room doesn’t help negotiations, because they’re fact-checking the employer constantly. Like when the boss says, “Well, we were fully staffed for that week that you were suggesting that we weren’t fully staffed,” all we have to do is pause, take a caucus.
There is no way that any trade-union leader can tell me that having a ton of workers from every shift in every kind of work in the room doesn’t help negotiations.
And there’s going to be thirty people in the room who can say to the boss, “You’re talking about the posted staffing grid, without callouts, and without you replacing people who were sick that day.” They bring you intelligence about how everything’s working. There’s no way an employer can go up against the intelligence of all the workers in their own facility. Compared to me — I’m just facilitating a conversation at that point, right? I don’t know what the hell is going on in their workplace, they do.
Micah Uetricht
In this book, and in basically the last three books, you’re focusing a lot on stories of this method succeeding, showing that it actually can work and explaining how it works. But I was also rereading your first book, which breaks a little bit from the other books. You like to win, as you’re constantly talking about. But the first book involves certain parts of the labor movement that you think were making very wrongheaded strategic decisions, particularly the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) at the time when you wrote the book, over a decade ago.
You talk in that book about the approach to negotiations that was being taken by SEIU’s national leadership at the time that took the opposite approach to these kinds of negotiations. Everything was about getting people in the door to the union — to begin with, flying a bunch of talented organizers to get people on board for this union, get them fired up about it, and then immediately leave town. Then the contract is completely out of those workers’ hands, turned over to the union. And they negotiated what were frequently quite bad contracts.
In No Shortcuts, you have a chapter on an SEIU local in the state of Washington that’s perhaps the most grotesque version of this, where the contract workers clearly have nothing to do with the negotiations of the contracts, and the contract is actually actively bad in many cases. That approach was dominant in some of the parts of the labor movement that considered themselves dynamic and active. Do you see that approach changing in the labor movement toward something more like what you advocate for? Or is this still the dominant way that most unions are handling their contract negotiations?
Jane McAlevey
Sadly, I think that most unions still are handling their negotiations with very small committees, assigning gag orders, and not being transparent at all about the negotiations.
To go back to that moment that you’re describing, the early 2000s, in SEIU (though I think it applies across the eight or so unions that were still trying at that time, as opposed to the several dozen who weren’t even trying): it was so egregious back then. Unions were actually lowering expectations, if not smashing and trashing workers expectations.
Now, there is a theory that there’s no way for workers to win until a lot more workers are in unions. I just think it’s the most outrageous theory I’ve ever heard. Because if workers don’t experience actual material gain, dignity, and respect for real life in their contracts, you’re going to reproduce dead unions. And there’s no way we’re going to build the power required to do everything we need to do like save the planet, stop cops from killing people, and much more.
Every day for organizers, there’s a strategic choice, the possibility of choosing a way to win. I write books to call people out and say, “Let’s try to win today.” Yet there’s the majority of trade-union officials who choose every day, remarkably to me, to lose.
Micah Uetricht
When you put it that way, why would you choose to be a loser?
Jane McAlevey
They’re lazy, they’re risk averse —it’s a fairly long list. But frankly, it’s unacceptable.
The point of each book is to say, “Let’s focus on what we can control.” And what we can control is our strategy and our power analysis.
Twenty-five years ago, we would have this discussion like, “Okay, it’s a bummer they’re not choosing to try to win. Wouldn’t it be great if they tried to win?” And then you kept waiting: Is this the crisis that’s going to make them choose to win? Is it the invasion of another country? Is it a financial crisis that bankrupted the working class another time, like in 2008?
I feel like looking at every labor leader and saying, ‘Is it that you don’t believe in science? Or do you want to die?’
Micah Uetricht
Is it an external event that’s going to spur people to action?
Jane McAlevey
That’s right. Sadly, we missed that opportunity when they bankrupted everyone’s mortgage. Now we literally have a time clock on us.
I feel like looking at every labor leader and saying, “Is it that you don’t believe in science? Or do you want to die?” Because that’s actually the choice right now.
What’s beautiful about this moment is that workers are really challenging the power-holders in their unions right now. And workers are forming new unions. A lot of workers are clear that there’s been a set of unions choosing to lose for a long time. They’re trying to figure out how to take this instrument, a union, and actually turn it into the force for good that we know it can be. That’s what’s exciting to me.
Part of the point of the books and the training courses is to actually enable tens of thousands of people to understand that there is a choice they can make to win. It usually starts with challenging the position-holders in their unions to turn their organization into the kind of organization that can do what just happened in Los Angeles.
There’s a lot of big winning to be done. But the organization has to be democratic. It has to be a high-participation organization in order to win. And that’s what opening up the negotiations process builds: a high-participation union. High-participation negotiations mean you believe in the everyday intelligence of the workers. It means that as a union official, you’re not going to be allowed to sell them out cheap for a cheap contract, because we’re all going to be in the room holding you accountable. And it’s going to build a different kind of labor movement. That’s what we show in every case study in Rules to Win By.
Micah Uetricht
One of the case studies in the book is of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP), which to me was maybe the most exciting chapter in the book. It’s a case study of how you did exactly what you just laid out with PASNAP. Can you talk about that as a case study, and how you went about winning all that you won with PASNAP?
Jane McAlevey
It starts with the foundation of a good union already being there before I arrived. I show in the chapter that in the decade or so leading up to those campaigns, that union had been constantly on strike. When workers were voting in 2016 and 2017 (it was seven different hospitals of mostly nurses voting to form unions in Philadelphia), they were doing it because they had seen a gigantic 2010 strike at Temple University Hospital, where the workers went out on an open-ended twenty-eight-day strike and took on management. In the end, they won pretty much everything they went out on strike for.
When I was brought in, I was doing my PhD. I needed to work during the PhD process. So I had carved out only one or two contract campaigns at a time — that’s what I could handle while also finishing my PhD in five years.
In 2016, when it was clear to the leadership that they didn’t even have enough people to negotiate the contracts, I began to get phone calls from the head of the union saying, “Something is going on in Philadelphia. There’s a whole lot of heat down here. We keep winning elections, and we can’t even stop to negotiate. Can you come down and start coordinating the first contract campaigns?” I keep saying no. Next thing I know, they invite me to be the keynote speaker at the convention. The whole leadership was organizing me, and I didn’t know it until I got there.
I go to their convention, which is in April, and I get surrounded by thirty-five worker-leaders from Einstein Medical Center who come up to me and say, “The employer filed charges against our election. The employer filed charges to get the election thrown out. This is the biggest hospital in the whole campaign in Philadelphia. And the employer filed charges against the National Labor Relations Board. We’re asking you to come down and help us get over these legal charges.”
We get there, and the truth is, what was tricky about the election was that the employer is contesting the election completely, so there is no union officially. The boss was putting out a message that says a majority of nurses never voted for the union — which is actually technically true. A majority of total workers had not affirmatively voted for the union if you counted those who didn’t vote. But by American democracy it was a slamming victory.
So the boss is putting out this constant message. That was the day-one thing. I met the workers, and I said, “To overcome that employer message, guess what you’re going to have to do? This thing called a majority petition, which is a petition that only you and your coworkers sign, no one else.”
That petition is going to say, “we demand the employer drop the legal charges, recognize the union, and get to the negotiations table.” These petitions are always very short. This is a structure test.
It was not easy, because there were whole anti-union departments at that point. The union busters don’t go away. They hadn’t left the hospital.
So this was an ongoing, daily, intense organizing campaign to get to that 90 percent supermajority across that hospital, even though they had already voted to form the union. It was constant organizing, and it was not until they hit barely a supermajority, 65 percent of them signing that petition — because we couldn’t move a couple of the key anti-union units [in the hospital] yet. So 65 percent of them sign a supermajority petition, saying it’s a lie.
And we immediately have the workers themselves blow the petition up into a gigantic poster. It’s called showing the boss. We immediately had delegations of nurses in their scrubs delivering it to every member of the board of trustees, the mayor, the city council, the media, everyone you could possibly imagine to say, “The boss is lying. The proof is in every signature on the paper.”
The reason why PASNAP brought me there was because like at Amazon or Starbucks, the employer is going to continue contesting and using lawfare to stop workers from ever getting to the contract.
That’s the first pivot in the campaign. Meanwhile, the employers lose the charge, but they keep filing appeals. And we know that’s the whole point. The reason why PASNAP brought me there was because like at Amazon or Starbucks, the employer is going to continue contesting and using lawfare and the legal process to stop workers from ever getting to the contract, unless the workers can figure out how to create a crisis for that employer that brings them to their knees. Which is exactly what the workers did in Philadelphia.
Micah Uetricht
In reading this part of the book, as a reader, you get to the point you’re describing, and you’re like, “Finally, the good guys overcome all the roadblocks and win in the end.” But then you’re like, “Wait a minute, no, this was all just so that the workers could get to the negotiating table” — so that they could start negotiating a contract, because the boss didn’t want to even get to that point. So you had to do all of this just to get to the point where you could then do the open negotiation strategy.
Jane McAlevey
That first structure test, that first majority petition, didn’t even get us the table. We then held a strike vote, then threatened to disrupt the entire Hillary Clinton nomination at the Democratic National Convention. So there were several more steps before the power structure of Philadelphia would be forced by the threat of a strike by a mostly female workforce — the exact demographic that the Clinton campaign believed that it needed to win Pennsylvania.
The Democratic Party believed it needed black people to over-vote in Philadelphia, then white women in the suburbs. Guess who the one thousand nurses in the hospital were? Black nurses in the city. And white nurses from the Philadelphia suburbs, there were literally a thousand. We kept telling the power structure, “There’s a thousand people who are a microcosm of your strategy to win a swing state called Pennsylvania. And by the way, you’re going to lose, because not one of them wants to talk about Hillary Clinton — and if workers don’t want to talk about something, you’re in trouble.”
This goes to labor strategy that chooses to lose: the Philadelphia labor council had signed what’s called a “labor peace accord” a year earlier, which required that all unions not take any workplace action when the Democratic National Convention was happening in Philadelphia. But PASNAP was an independent union. Thus, the independent union was not bound by said agreement (which is a strong argument for union independence).
When I pointed this small fact out to several people in the power structure, the heart attacks began, because we threatened to put registered nurses in uniform in front of the nominating convention for Hillary Clinton if the employer did not drop those legal charges. And we’re going to negotiate an expedited negotiations agreement, on the back of people screaming at the top of their lungs at us for holding the nominating convention hostage.
Anytime we can hold the Democratic National Convention committee hostage, I’m for it. And it worked. Because we understood the power-structure analysis, which was that the local host committee was not going to tolerate picket lines. We were explicitly saying to them: “When the entire international media is here, we’re going to have a bunch of black and white women saying that you failed them. That’s your choice. Otherwise, fix the problem with the CEO in the hospital.” And that problem got fixed.
Micah Uetricht
There’s much more to that story. People will have to get it in the book. But there is a very funny moment during those negotiations where you go into the negotiating room, and one of the boss’s negotiators has a copy of your first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell). He’s got it all marked up — there are tabs in it to show that he’s definitely read the thing. His basic orientation is, “Oh McAlevey, I’m onto you. I read your book, you spell it all out here in the book what you’re going to do to me during these negotiations. You idiot, why did you write it all down?!”
He’s trying to intimidate you and show that he knows what’s coming. But it ends up not really mattering that he knows what’s coming, because he can’t fight supermajority participation. There’s no way he can win, even though he knows what’s coming, because it’s such an overwhelming show of force by the workers there.
Jane McAlevey
It was a very funny moment, because I actually forgot I had a book out. I often forget. He walked into the very first opening session, when the nurses forced that employer into the room. And he had the book positioned as the first thing you would see upon entering the room. There’s 150 workers in the room. I’m keeping poker face.
He literally says out loud, “Well, it’s just like the book says: there’s a lot of people in here. I bet you’re going to show an opening presentation next that only the workers give, right?” And I go, “Yes, could you please sit down?”
At the first caucus meeting during the negotiations, it led to the best fit of laughter that I’ve ever had with the negotiating committee. The first worker-leader got up and said, “Well, what an effing idiot. He read the book, and we’re going to kill him anyway.”
So the point is, it doesn’t matter. If the workers get organized and create a crisis, they can win.
Micah Uetricht
I want to zoom out for a second and talk about your relationship to ideology. I’m interested in the tactics that you’re describing in the book but also bigger-picture questions. On the one hand, you don’t seem to have a lot of interest in or patience for ideology. You’re principally interested in winning. The other day, I told you about a book project I’m working on, about old socialists who were in the labor movement, many of whom lost quite a bit. And your response was basically, “Why would you waste your time? They didn’t win very much.”
So you’re interested principally in winning. On the other hand, in No Shortcuts, you go quite a bit into the history of the American labor movement. You have a very fundamental respect for the organizing done by the Communist Party and various kinds of socialists during the CIO’s heyday in the 1930s, because there’s a very clear scholarly consensus that these radicals were the most dedicated organizers in that period. You couldn’t have built the early CIO if you didn’t have radicals playing very key roles in such organizing.
You seem less interested in people who can cook up impressive theories and more interested in people who can carry out impressive wins. Is this an accurate description?
Jane McAlevey
Yes. I’m much more interested in people who are teaching people how to win. And it’s not that I don’t think ideology doesn’t matter. I think what matters is: What are the principles on which we’re doing the work, and can we point to them showing success? Part of my cynicism, about not spending a lot of time on these questions for my whole lifetime, is rooted in several things.
One, there’s not a lot of great world-historic examples to show for in the name of communism or socialism. There’s definitely not good ones to show from capitalism. If as an organizer, day to day what I’m doing is raising people’s expectations that they themselves can build the power to change their workplace and win, having a long discussion about the debates of what did or didn’t work in the Soviet Union is not actually going to help the campaign at all. What is going to help workers come to understand capitalism as a problem is not me telling them that — it’s actually them learning it. It’s actually them experiencing the crisis that capitalism is creating in their lives.
I feel like I do ideology in every campaign and every day of the week, and I do that ideology by helping workers come to the realization that the system in the United States that they’re living under is an abject failure; that condemning people who make the profits to poverty is an absolute failed model. There must be something better out there. I’m pretty sure that that’s socialism, if you push me on it. The principles of socialism are good, but I’ve met too many people who call themselves socialists and are the biggest assholes who couldn’t win a thing. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time hanging out with them. It’s not helpful to me, and it’s not helpful to the American working class.
I do ideology in every campaign and every day of the week, and I do that ideology by helping workers come to the realization that the system in the United States that they’re living under is an abject failure.
When we get close enough to being able to contest for state power, I’m going to switch gears a lot and focus on that. But at this point, we’re trying to teach workers how to control their unions, so that they can go on and actually win and challenge mayors and state power.
The methods I use are an ideology. Transparent, big, open negotiations are ideology. Being honest with workers about what it’s going to take to win is a form of ideology, showing them and helping them experience building democratic, collective worker majorities that can govern their workplace — what is better than teaching workers how to actually govern the hardest place to govern?
It’s not that I don’t think it matters. It’s that from age eighteen when I was student-organizer, and some schmuck from the Spartacist League slipped a four-point-font newsletter in my hand, I just thought, “Who are these losers?” Seriously, I didn’t even know what the Spartacist League was. I’m like, “Are you from Greece or Rome? Who are you?” And then at subsequent conferences, I’d be bombarded by like ninety other people handing me forty different versions of a badly put-together newsletter yelling at me. I just thought, “I’m not spending my time with these people.” That doesn’t count Jacobin.
Micah Uetricht
And it doesn’t count, say, the Communist Party in the auto factories.
Jane McAlevey
Of course, they get credit. In No Shortcuts, I show that what those Communists were doing is no different than what I’m doing. I tried to argue that whether the experienced, skilled organizer is positioned inside the workplace, in the rank and file, or outside like I have been, doesn’t matter. It’s about what we are teaching the workers, how they are learning it, and if they are learning self-confidence and the ability to win.
I absolutely believe capitalism is an absolutely failed model. There’s no question about it. I just don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what’s got to be perfect about the new system, because we’re so far from it. When we get closer, I’m ready to throw down and figure out what it is.
Micah Uetricht
This leads to the point that you make in the conclusion of your previous book, A Collective Bargain, and you make several other times in your work, that while you’re mostly writing about strategy and tactics for organizing unions and negotiations, you say that the strategy and tactics that you’re laying out are not just about the labor movement, and in fact should be used as part of a broader, transformative project in all of society that can include politics and other kinds of social movements. Can you talk briefly about the potential for the use of these kinds of strategies that you lay out in these books as going beyond the labor movement?
Jane McAlevey
The methods apply across the board. There are organic or natural leaders that exist all through society; the organizer doesn’t make leaders, leaders actually exist. Our job is to help coworkers, or tenants, or students — our job is to help people identify that there are natural leaders among the working class all over the place, and that we’re going to be more effective if we help lead with people who are already natural leaders, who will then need to be skilled up and taught the art of war, which is sort of what these methods are. That doesn’t just exist in the workplace.
I believe in something called “whole worker organizing.” It’s what the communists and the socialists were doing in the 1930s and 1940s, bringing workers’ own community into the fight. People will say to me (only in academia, not workers), “You can’t really do that anymore, though, because people don’t go to church, or they don’t have any more faith, or people are dispersed, or they don’t live together. It isn’t like factories in the 1930s and 1940s, where you had huge populations of immigrants living next to each other in a factory town.”
We’re just not going to win by talking to ourselves.
I’ve heard this so many times. But whole worker organizing just takes a little bit more work these days. We have to adjust the idea for the times. So how do you adjust?
The methods of identifying natural leaders, and then helping skill those people up to lead, whatever the fight they’re having is, to lead that struggle — that’s going to be more effective and efficient than just spending all of our time talking to the most committed people who come back to every meeting every day. We’re just not going to win by talking to ourselves. We are going to win when we train people across movements and across sectors in these methods.
Methods are adjustable. We adjust them to different times and conditions and settings. But the methods matter. And a core one is: stop talking to just yourselves and start spending every single day talking to people who you’re not talking to, because that’s the way we’re going to build the kind of power required to stop fascism.
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An F-35 Lightning II performs at the 2023 NAF El Centro Air Show at Naval Air Facility El Centro on March 11, 2023 in El Centro, California. (Daniel Knighton / Getty Images)
The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than sixty years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation.
The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion — more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.
This year’s spending just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy.
The list goes on — and on and on. President Eisenhower characterized such trade-offs in a lesser known speech, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered in April 1953, early in his first term, this way:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
How sadly of this moment that is.
Now, don’t be fooled. The current war machine isn’t your grandfather’s MIC, not by a country mile. It receives far more money and offers far different rationales. It has far more sophisticated tools of influence and significantly different technological aspirations.
Perhaps the first and foremost difference between Eisenhower’s era and ours is the sheer size of the major weapons firms. Before the post–Cold War merger boom of the 1990s, there were dozens of significant defense contractors. Now, there are just five big (no, enormous!) players — Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. With so few companies to produce aircraft, armored vehicles, missile systems, and nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has ever-more limited leverage in keeping them from overcharging for products that don’t perform as advertised. The Big Five alone routinely split more than $150 billion in Pentagon contracts annually, or nearly 20 percent of the total Pentagon budget. Altogether, more than half of the department’s annual spending goes to contractors large and small.
In Eisenhower’s day, the Soviet Union, then this country’s major adversary, was used to justify an ever-larger, ever-more permanent arms establishment. Today’s “pacing threat,” as the Pentagon calls it, is China, a country with a far larger population, a far more robust economy, and a far more developed technical sector than the Soviet Union ever had. But unlike the USSR, China’s primary challenge to the United States is economic, not military.
Yet, as Dan Grazier noted in a December 2022 report for the Project on Government Oversight, Washington’s ever-more intense focus on China has been accompanied by significant military threat inflation. While China hawks in Washington wring their hands about that country having more naval vessels than America, Grazier points out that our Navy has far more firepower. Similarly, the active American nuclear weapons stockpile is roughly nine times as large as China’s and the Pentagon budget three times what Beijing spends on its military, according to the latest figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
The threat of China’s military, real or imagined, continues to be used to justify significant increases in military spending.
But for Pentagon contractors, Washington’s ever-more intense focus on the prospect of war with China has one overriding benefit: it’s fabulous for business. The threat of China’s military, real or imagined, continues to be used to justify significant increases in military spending, especially on the next generation of high-tech systems ranging from hypersonic missiles to robotic weapons and artificial intelligence. The history of such potentially dysfunctional high-tech systems, from President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system to the F-35, does not bode well, however, for the cost or performance of emerging military technologies.
No matter, count on one thing: tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars will undoubtedly go into developing them anyway. And remember that they are dangerous, and not just to any enemy. As Michael Klare pointed out in an Arms Control Association report: “AI-enabled systems may fail in unpredictable ways, causing unintended human slaughter or an uncontrolled escalation crisis.”
Despite a seemingly never–ending list of overpriced, underperforming weapons systems developed for a Pentagon that’s the only federal agency never to pass an audit, the MIC has an arsenal of influence propelling it ever-closer to a trillion-dollar annual budget. In short, it’s bilking more money from taxpayers than ever before, and just about everyone — from lobbyists galore to countless political campaigns, think tanks beyond number to Hollywood — is in on it.
And keep in mind that the dominance of a handful of mega-firms in weapons production means that each of the top players has more money to spread around in lobbying and campaign contributions. They also have more facilities and employees to point to, often in politically key states, when persuading members of Congress to vote for — yes!– even more money for their weaponry of choice.
The arms industry as a whole has donated more than $83 million to political candidates in the past two election cycles, with Lockheed Martin leading the pack with $9.1 million in contributions, followed by Raytheon at $8 million, and Northrop Grumman at $7.7 million. Those funds, you won’t be surprised to learn, are heavily concentrated among members of the House and Senate armed services committees and defense appropriations subcommittees. For example, as Taylor Giorno of OpenSecrets, a group that tracks campaign and lobbying expenditures, has found, “The 58 members of the House Armed Services Committee reported receiving an average of $79,588 from the defense sector during the 2022 election cycle, three times the average $26,213 other representatives reported through the same period.”
Lobbying expenditures by all the denizens of the MIC are even higher — more than $247 million in the last two election cycles. Such funds are used to employ 820 lobbyists, or more than one for every member of Congress. And mind you, more than two-thirds of those lobbyists had swirled through Washington’s infamous revolving door from jobs at the Pentagon or in Congress to lobby for the arms industry. Their contacts in government and knowledge of arcane acquisition procedures help ensure that the money keeps flowing for more guns, tanks, ships, and missiles. Just last month, the office of Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren reported that nearly seven hundred former high-ranking government officials, including former generals and admirals, now work for defense contractors. While a few of them are corporate board members or highly paid executives, 91 percent of them became Pentagon lobbyists, according to the report.
The arms-industry revolving door provides current members of Congress, their staff, and Pentagon personnel with a powerful incentive to play nice with those giant contractors while still in their government roles.
And that feverishly spinning revolving door provides current members of Congress, their staff, and Pentagon personnel with a powerful incentive to play nice with those giant contractors while still in their government roles. After all, a lucrative lobbying career awaits once they leave government service.
Nor is it just K Street lobbying jobs those weapons-making corporations are offering. They’re also spreading jobs to nearly every Main Street in the United States. The poster child for such jobs as a selling point for an otherwise questionable weapons system is Lockheed Martin’s F-35. It may never be fully ready for combat thanks to countless design flaws, including more than eight hundred unresolved defects detected by the Pentagon’s independent testing office. But the company insists that its program produces no less than 298,000 jobs in forty-eight states, even if the actual total is less than half of that.
In reality — though you’d never know this in today’s Washington — the weapons sector is a declining industry when it comes to job creation, even if it does absorb near-record levels of government funding. According to statistics gathered by the National Defense Industrial Association, there are currently one million direct jobs in arms manufacturing compared to 3.2 million in the 1980s.
Outsourcing, automation, and the production of fewer units of more complex systems have skewed the workforce toward better-paying engineering jobs and away from production work, a shift that has come at a high price. The vacuuming up of engineering and scientific talent by weapons makers means fewer skilled people are available to address urgent problems like public health and the climate crisis. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that spending on education, green energy, health care, or infrastructure could produce 40 percent to 100 percent more jobs than Pentagon spending does.
One of the MIC’s most powerful tools is its ability to shape elite discussions on national security issues by funding foreign policy think tanks, along with affiliated analysts who are all too often the experts of choice when it comes to media coverage on issues of war and peace. A forthcoming Quincy Institute brief reveals that more than 75 percent of the top foreign-policy think tanks in the United States are at least partially funded by defense contractors. Some, like the Center for a New American Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, receive millions of dollars every year from such contractors and then publish articles and reports that are largely supportive of defense-industry funding.
Some such think tanks even offer support for weapons made by their funders without disclosing those glaring conflicts of interest. For example, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar’s critique of this year’s near-historically high Pentagon budget request, which, she claimed, was “well below inflation,” also included support for increased funding for a number of weapons systems like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, the B-21 bomber, and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.
What’s not mentioned in the piece? The companies that build those weapons, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, have been AEI funders. Although that institute is a “dark money” think tank that doesn’t publicly disclose its funders, at an event last year, a staffer let slip that the organization receives money from both of those contractors.
When you see a think-tank expert quoted on questions of war and peace, odds are his or her employer receives money from the war machine.
Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets disproportionately rely on commentary from experts at just such think tanks. That forthcoming Quincy Institute report, for example, found that these think tanks were more than four times as likely as those without MIC funding to be cited in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal articles about the Ukraine war. In short, when you see a think-tank expert quoted on questions of war and peace, odds are his or her employer receives money from the war machine.
What’s more, such think tanks have their own version of a feverishly spinning revolving door, earning them the moniker “holding tanks” for future government officials. The Center for a New American Security, for example, receives millions of dollars from defense contractors and the Pentagon every year and has boasted that a number of its experts and alumni joined the Biden administration, including high-ranking political appointees at the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Top Gun: Maverick was a certified blockbuster, wowing audiences that ultimately gave that action film an astounding 99 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes — and such popular acclaim helped earn the movie a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It was also a resounding success for the Pentagon, which worked closely with the filmmakers and provided “equipment — including jets and aircraft carriers — personnel and technical expertise,” and even had the opportunity to make script revisions, according to the Washington Post. Defense contractors were similarly a pivotal part of that movie’s success. In fact, the CEO of Lockheed Martin boasted that his firm “partnered with Top Gun’s producers to bring cutting-edge, future forward technology to the big screen.”
While Top Gun: Maverick might have been the most successful recent product of the military-entertainment complex, it’s just the latest installment in a long history of Hollywood spreading military propaganda. “The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows,” according to Professor Roger Stahl, who researches propaganda and state violence at the University of Georgia.
“The result is an entertainment culture rigged to produce relatively few antiwar movies and dozens of blockbusters that glorify the military,” explained journalist David Sirota, who has repeatedly called attention to the perils of the military-entertainment complex. “And save for filmmakers’ obligatory thank you to the Pentagon in the credits,” argued Sirota, “audiences are rarely aware that they may be watching government-subsidized propaganda.”
More than sixty years after Eisenhower identified the problem and gave it a name, the military-industrial complex continues to use its unprecedented influence to corrupt budget and policy processes, starve funding for nonmilitary solutions to security problems, and ensure that war is the ever-more likely “solution” to this country’s problems. The question is: What can be done to reduce its power over our lives, our livelihoods, and ultimately, the future of the planet?
Countering the modern-day military-industrial complex would mean dislodging each of the major pillars undergirding its power and influence. That would involve campaign-finance reform; curbing the revolving door between the weapons industry and government; shedding more light on its funding of political campaigns, think tanks, and Hollywood; and prioritizing investments in the jobs of the future in green technology and public health instead of piling up ever-more weapons systems. Most important of all, perhaps, a broad-based public education campaign is needed to promote more realistic views of the challenge posed by China and to counter the current climate of fear that serves the interests of the Pentagon — and the giant weapons contractors — at the expense of the safety and security of the rest of us.
That, of course, would be no small undertaking, but the alternative — an ever-spiraling arms race that could spark a world-ending conflict or prevent us from addressing existential threats like climate change and pandemics — is simply unacceptable.