How to Sustain Momentum for the Anti-Racism Movement

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Los Angeles Times

07 July 20

hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.”

My old UCLA coach, John Wooden, used to quote that Walt Whitman poem often, and I’ve been hearing its echoes on the streets lately. The people out protesting systemic racism and vowing change are “singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs” about the America that could be — that should be.

But in my 60 years of social activism, I’ve heard these gospel songs before and my fear is that once the spotlights go down, the sympathetic audience — now moved to tears by the chorus — simply goes home, the words to the songs quickly forgotten.

You can’t be in the business of social reform without a deep reservoir of hope and faith in the general goodness of people. And some of my faith has been rewarded in recent days: City and state governments are instituting police reforms, private corporations are drawing up more inclusive policies, media companies are firing executives, actors and writers for racist or misogynistic behavior. Celebrities and politicians are making public statements in support of Black Lives Matter and other progressive organizations. Sports organizations are offering apologies for past acts of exclusion.

My optimism was further kindled when I saw dozens of police officers across the country hugging and linking arms with protesters. My father was a decorated police officer and I think he would have faced the protesters with sympathy rather than scorn. But I’ve felt hope like this before. And tears of hope in this country have often been replaced by tears of frustration and rage.

Civil rights activists are not here to fluff the public’s conscience, nor is the cause of “equality for all” a nostalgic throwback, like efforts to recapture Woodstock. It’s a matter of life and death. It’s a matter of lopsided access to healthcare, of children denied equal educations and therefore unable to claim secure economic futures.

Throughout my life, I’ve seen these cycles of outrage, public protests and political promises. And then comes a silent slip-sliding back to the status quo until another horrific event grabs our attention again.

The cry for civil rights is like a rubber band: Intermittent passionate public support stretches it forward, despite those anchored in the past pulling it backward. It stretches and stretches until that support starts to drift away to something shinier and newer — then it snaps back. The stretching has made it slightly longer, so there’s some progress — three steps forward, two back is still a step forward — but it’s nowhere near what was promised. And we await another horrific act to bring the unaffected back to help us pull forward again. 

This may sound a little churlish or ungrateful, but I can’t help but wonder why so many organizations are expressing their outrage now, instead of last year, or the year before — or five years ago when an unarmed Eric Garner was choked to death uttering the same words as George Floyd: “I can’t breathe.” Why is Floyd’s death suddenly a revelation, an epiphany, but Garner’s wasn’t? In 2015, police killed more than 100 unarmed Black people.

The NFL says Black Lives Matter, yet until recently it was still punishing players who expressed that sentiment. Target, Walmart and Facebook, among many others, are suddenly supporting BLM. It’s great news that they are all stepping up, but those of us who have been at this for a long time know that the fight for equal rights is a lifelong commitment, not a summer job.

Meaningful and measurable progress for any marginalized group — people of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, Jews — can be achieved only when all besieged groups pull together, without waiting for or needing or having to convince others who don’t face the same challenges. We want them, we welcome them, we appreciate them, but we can’t need them. What the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” in 1963 still holds true:

“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action… ' ”

It’s exhausting and frustrating trying to convince such people that systemic racism pervades all aspects of American life. It’s like talking to a flat-Earther. Proof is useless. Their steadfast refusal to believe the hundreds of studies by prominent scientists reminds me of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, responsible for millions of lives being saved by discovering that hospital deaths could be drastically reduced merely by washing hands with disinfectant. Most of the medical community rejected his conclusion — despite growing evidence that he was right. He was ultimately committed to an asylum, where he was beaten by guards and died 14 days later. Only after his death were his theories widely accepted.

They couldn’t see germs, so they weren’t real. Sound familiar? In “The Usual Suspects,” character Verbal Kint says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” I’d tweak that a bit. The other greatest trick is convincing the world racism doesn’t exist. We have to stop trying to roll these deliberate dullards uphill because, like Sisyphus, we’ll never get them to the top of the mountain to see the possible paradise on the other side. 

Where will African Americans be 90 days from now? Will people continue to believe the evidence before them even as the nation begins to reopen and protests grow smaller and less frequent, then disappear? As headlines become dominated with COVID-19’s second wave, with potential vaccines and vaccine deniers, with President Trump’s delusions, Joe Biden’s gaffes and celebrity missteps, will there still be any mentions of systemic racism? Will real changes have occurred?

There are things we can do, benchmarks we can insist on, to keep the freedom train moving ahead. Over the past few weeks I’ve heard excellent suggestions for reform in our systems of justice, policing, healthcare, education and economic security, all of which give preference to white people. We have no shortage of good ideas. Now what we need is a way to measure improvement, ideally through a website to monitor proposals, manage progress, identify obstacles and centralize information for everyone to access. A user could go to this site to see what legislation is proposed to prevent police brutality, who supports it, who opposes it. We could stay informed on the implementation of solutions and know when to apply pressure. Such a website could mobilize action and focus attention on practical solutions, providing a thermometer to measure the health of social justice.

The moral universe doesn’t bend toward justice unless pressure is applied. In my seventh decade of hope, I am once again optimistic that we may be able to collectively apply that pressure, not just to fulfill the revolutionary promises of the U.S. Constitution, but because we want to live and thrive.

It's Time for Mexico to Tax the Rich

By Kurt Hackbarth, Jacobin

07 July 20

Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with a caste of superrich lording over a mass of urban and rural poor barely surviving. Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s transfer programs have gone some way toward distributing wealth, but much more needs to be done.

usterity and the fight against corruption will allow us to free up sufficient funds, more than we can imagine .?.?. to stimulate the development of Mexico,” said President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in his inaugural address on December 1, 2018. “With this simple formula of ending corruption and putting republican austerity into practice, there will be no need to raise taxes in real terms, and this is a commitment I am making.”

“Austerity,” “no new taxes”: Just what kind of administration was AMLO launching only minutes into his presidency? A year and a half later, and with the aggravating circumstance of a COVID-19-induced recession in the offing, both the successes and limitations of the president’s fiscal policy have become much clearer.

A Politics of Principle

AMLO took pains later in the same speech to distinguish his definition of the word austerity from the one that has ravaged economies worldwide. “[It] does not mean, as is thought in other countries, a mere collection of adjustments in productive and social expenditure. Here we understand it not only as an administrative matter, but as a politics of principle, one that implies ending the privileges of the top-level bureaucracy. [Former president Benito] Juárez said that public officials must learn to live with a just sense of moderation, and we sustain that there cannot be a rich government with a poor population.”

In other words, what AMLO has argued for, here and elsewhere, is a moral understanding of austerity: the idea, inherited from Rousseauian republicanism and the nineteenth-century liberals who laid the foundations of the modern Mexican state, of enlightened governors who live within their means and lead by example. In a country oppressed for centuries by top-heavy, centralized administrations, from the viceroys of New Spain to the “Pharaonic” presidencies of recent times, the message is a potent one.

The sight of former president Enrique Peña Nieto winging around the world with his expensive retinue in a luxury plane so large it required the building of a custom hangar, while members of the government used official helicopters for golf outings, and his wife had a multimillion-dollar home built in the exclusive Lomas district of Mexico City (by the same chummy contractor that built the airplane hangar), rankled to the core a public scraping by with an average wage of little over US$500 a month.

This idea of exemplary austerity, combined with the liberation-theology-inspired concept of the preferential option for the poor (the slogan for his first presidential run in 2006 was “Por el bien de todos, primero los pobres,” or “For the good of all, the poor come first”) combined to give AMLO’s message an ardor that has underpinned its success.

As opposed to the crop of bland technocrats who have occupied the center-left terrain in much of the Anglophone world, AMLO speaks with a simple and clear moral urgency, one that goes over the head of the fickle middle class to speak directly to the half of the nation living in poverty. Where the Left in other countries has ceded the concept of morality to the hypocrisy and fundamentalist pandering of the Right, AMLO has made it his own.

If It Walks Like a Duck

AMLO’s vision took legislative form in the eponymous Law of Republican Austerity, passed in November 2019. Among the stipulations were a ten-year ban on public servants joining private companies they had a part in supervising or regulating; the ability to nullify contracts derived from influence peddling; limits on top salaries, office expenses, government-financed travel to congresses and conventions, advertising, and the assignation of drivers, secretaries, and outside consultants; a crackdown on agencies duplicating the same functions; a ban on the purchase of luxury vehicles, on unnecessary office remodeling, and private savings, pensions, and health plans for public servants; the prohibition of nepotism in hiring; and a crackdown on the proliferation of public trust funds, too often used for discretionary purposes.

Few would argue with these provisions, nor with the overarching need to attack the excess and corruption of prior administrations in order to free up funds for the president’s social agenda. The problem is, in order to fully finance his priority projects — the national guard, maintenance scholarships for students and apprentices, old age and disability pensions, aid for farmers, and big-ticket infrastructure items such as the new Mexico City airport, the Dos Bocas oil refinery, and the controversial Maya Train project in the Yucatán Peninsula — he has also had to resort to stiff cuts elsewhere. Particularly hard hit have been the areas of tourism, culture, the environment, scientific investigation, and archeology, a situation aggravated by a COVID-19-induced executive order requiring swingeing cuts in agencies’ operating expenses for the rest of 2020.

The argument can and has been made that these cuts were necessary to clip the wings of the “golden bureaucracy” that has continued to squander money at the highest levels of administration. And although there is no doubt that this is true, this justification can only go so far. AMLO, it is to be recalled, ran for president in 2018 on a platform calling for a balanced budget. And while all of this has kept the vultures of international lenders away — at the same time that neighbors such as El Salvador have succumbed to the temptation of an IMF loan to fight COVID-19 — an uncanny resemblance begins to present itself between AMLO’s macroeconomic policy and the strictures of orthodox economics. How much of his vaunted moral austerity, then, is also economic?

Taxes Are for Suckers

A primary factor underlying AMLO’s “robbing Peter to pay Paul” budgetary maneuvers, as we saw at the outset, is his refusal to generate more revenue through taxes. What he has done in recent weeks, to great success, is to crack down on companies that issue false tax receipts and goad some of the country’s largest tax delinquents into coughing up what they owe.

Companies such as Walmart, Toyota, IBM Mexico, and FEMSA (owner of the OXXO chain of convenience stores) have agreed to settle up back taxes, late fees, and fines to the tune of some $30 billion pesos (US$1.3 billion). So incensed was the owner of FEMSA, José Antonio Fernández Carbajal, at having to pay his taxes that he promised to pour double of what he owed into defeating AMLO in the recall referendum scheduled for 2022.

All of this is well, good, and necessary. But it is no substitute for an integral tax reform. Mexico’s tax-to-GDP ratio of 16.1 percent, less than half of the OECD average, ranks it dead last among member countries. Lulled by decades of oil revenue and immigrant remittances, it has created a tax code that is an open invitation for the wealthy to evade. On paper, Mexicans pay taxes at levels that are practically European: a progressive income tax (ISR) of up to 35 percent and a value-added tax (IVA) of 16 percent. But because of a generous system of write-offs — including private school tuition, private doctor’s visits, and every peso of the IVA incurred in business expenses — wealthy individuals and corporations wind up getting most or all of this back, and can even wind up with hefty balances in their favor to apply to subsequent years.

Meanwhile, the “captive contributors” (salaried employees and the poor) are left to foot the bill. What is more, special tax rules allow corporations to put off paying taxes, sometimes for years. And thanks to the nation’s extremely low capital gains rate of 10 percent, businesses can be bought and sold on the stock market with precious little going to public coffers — such as the nation’s banks, most of which were gobbled up by foreign concerns before even this modest levy existed.

The result is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with a caste of superrich lording over a mass of urban and rural poor barely getting by. And while AMLO’s transfer programs have gone some way toward distributing wealth, these programs will only ever be a palliative without a serious effort to overhaul a deeply unjust tax system.

Gaining Steam

The phenomenon of upper-class tax avoidance, of course, is a pan–Latin American problem. And recent polling evidence suggests a growing consensus throughout the region on the need to tax large fortunes. In Chile, following a tax hike on the wealthy passed in the winter as a response to the fall uprisings, its Congress passed an additional 2.5 percent tax on fortunes in May in order to finance an emergency basic income program during the COVID-19 crisis. Similar measures are being debated in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Bolivia by presidential candidate Luis Arce.

It would be exceedingly ironic if AMLO, who has made a crusade out of exposing the privileges, cronyism, and corruption of the “white-collar mafia,” were to remain isolated from this trend. If he considers austerity to be such a moral virtue, it is time for Mexico’s superrich to experience their share of it.