What’s happening in Niger is far from a typical coup

The recent wave of coups in West Africa must be understood in the context of widespread discontent with the ruling elites and their collaboration with imperialism

August 15, 2023 by Vijay Prashad

On July 26, 2023, Niger’s presidential guard moved against the sitting president—Mohamed Bazoum—and conducted a coup d’état. A brief contest among the various armed forces in the country ended with all the branches agreeing to the removal of Bazoum and the creation of a military junta led by Presidential Guard Commander General Abdourahamane “Omar” Tchiani. This is the fourth country in the Sahel region of Africa to have experienced a coup—the other three being Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali. The new government announced that it would stop allowing France to leech Niger’s uranium (one in three lightbulbs in France is powered by the uranium from the field in Arlit, northern Niger). Tchiani’s government revoked all military cooperation with France, which means that the 1,500 French troops will need to start packing their bags (as they did in both Burkina Faso and Mali). Meanwhile, there has been no public statement about Airbase 201, the US facility in Agadez, a thousand kilometers from the country’s capital of Niamey. This is the largest drone base in the world and key to US operations across the Sahel. US troops have been told to remain on the base for now and drone flights have been suspended. The coup is certainly against the French presence in Niger, but this anti-French sentiment has not enveloped the US military footprint in the country.

Interventions

Hours after the coup was stabilized, the main Western states—especially France and the United States—condemned the coup and asked for the reinstatement of Bazoum, who was immediately detained by the new government. But neither France nor the United States appeared to want to lead the response to the coup. Earlier this year, the French and US governments worried about an insurgency in northern Mozambique that impacted the assets of the Total-Exxon natural gas field off the coastline of Cabo Delgado. Rather than send in French and US troops, which would have polarized the population and increased anti-Western sentiment, the French and the United States made a deal for Rwanda to send its troops into Mozambique. Rwandan troops entered the northern province of Mozambique and shut down the insurgency. Both Western powers seem to favor a “Rwanda” type solution to the coup in Niger, but rather than have Rwanda enter Niger the hope was for ECOWAS—the Economic Community of West African States—to send in its force to restore Bazoum.

A day after the coup, ECOWAS condemned the coup. ECOWAS encompasses fifteen West African states, which in the past few years has suspended Burkina Faso and Mali from their ranks because of the coups in that country; Niger was also suspended from ECOWAS a few days after the coup. Formed in 1975 as an economic bloc, the grouping decided—despite no mandate in its original mission—to send in peacekeeping forces in 1990 into the heart of the Liberian Civil War. Since then, ECOWAS has sent its peacekeeping troops to several countries in the region, including Sierra Leone and Gambia. Not long after the coup in Niger, ECOWAS placed an embargo on the country that included suspending its right to basic commercial transactions with its neighbors, freezing Niger’s central bank assets that are held in regional banks, and stopping foreign aid (which comprises forty percent of Niger’s budget). The most striking statement was that ECOWAS would take “all measures necessary to restore constitutional order.” An August 6 deadline given by ECOWAS expired because the bloc could not agree to send troops across the border. ECOWAS asked for a “standby force” to be assembled and ready to invade Niger. Then, ECOWAS said it would meet on August 12 in Accra, Ghana, to go over its options. That meeting was canceled for “technical reasons.” Mass demonstrations in key ECOWAS countries—such as Nigeria and Senegal—against an ECOWAS military invasion of Niger have confounded their own politicians to support an intervention. It would be naïve to suggest that no intervention is possible. Events are moving very fast, and there is no reason to suspect that ECOWAS will not intervene before August ends.

Coups in the Sahel

When ECOWAS suggested the possibility of an intervention into Niger, the military governments in Burkina Faso and Mali said that this would be a “declaration of war” not only against Niger but also against their countries. On August 2, one of the key leaders of the Niger coup, General Salifou Mody traveled to Bamako (Mali) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) to discuss the situation in the region and to coordinate their response to the possibility of an ECOWAS—or Western—military intervention into Niger. Ten days later, General Moussa Salaou Barmou went to Conakry (Guinea) to seek that country’s support for Niger from the leader of the military government in that country, Mamadi Doumbouya. Suggestions have already been floated for Niger—one of the most important countries in the Sahel—to form part of the conversation of a federation that will include Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali. This would be a federation of countries that have had coups to overthrow what have been seen to be pro-Western governments that have not met the expectations of increasingly impoverished populations.

The story of the coup in Niger becomes partly the story of what the communist journalist Ruth First called “the contagion of the coup” in her remarkable book, The Barrel of the Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’états (1970). Over the course of the past thirty years, politics in the Sahel countries has seriously desiccated. Parties with a history in the national liberation movements, even the socialist movements (such as Bazoum’s party) have collapsed into being representatives of their elites, who are conduits of a Western agenda. The French-US-NATO war in Libya in 2011 allowed jihadis groups to pour out of Libya and flock into southern Algeria and into the Sahel (almost half of Mali is held by al-Qaeda-linked formations). The entry of these forces gave the local elites and the West the justification to further tighten limited trade union freedoms and to excise the left from the ranks of the established political parties. It is not as if the leaders of the mainline political parties are right-wing or center-right, but that whatever their orientation, they have no real independence from the will of Paris and Washington. They became—to use a word on the ground—“stooges” of the West.

Absent any reliable political instruments, the discarded rural and petty-bourgeois sections of the country turn to their children in the armed forces for leadership. People like Burkina Faso’s Captain Ibrahim Traoré (born 1988), who was raised in the rural province of Mouhoun, and Colonel Assimi Goïta (born 1988), who comes from the cattle market town and military redoubt of Kati, represent these broad class fractions perfectly. Their communities have been utterly left out of the hard austerity programs of the International Monetary Fund, of the theft of their resources by Western multinationals, and of the payments for Western military garrisons in the country. Discarded populations with no real political platform to speak for them, these communities have rallied behind their young men in the military. These are “Colonel’s Coups”—coups of ordinary people who have no other options—not “General’s Coups”—coups of the elites to stem the political advancement of the people. That is why the coup in Niger is being defended in mass rallies from Niamey to the small, remote towns that border Libya. When I traveled to these regions before the pandemic, it was clear that the anti-French sentiment found no channel of expression other than hope for a military coup that would bring in leaders such as Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, who had been assassinated in 1987. Captain Traoré, in fact, sports a red beret like Sankara, speaks with Sankara’s left-wing frankness, and even mimics Sankara’s diction. It would be a mistake to see these men as from the left since they are moved by anger at the failure of the elites and of Western policy. They do not come to power with a well-worked out agenda built from left political traditions.

The Niger military leaders have formed a twenty-one-person cabinet headed by Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, a civilian who had been a finance minister in a previous government and worked at the African Development Bank in Chad. Military leaders are prominent in the cabinet. Whether the appointment of this civilian-led cabinet will divide the ranks of ECOWAS is to be seen. Certainly, Western imperialist forces—notably the United States with troops on the ground in Niger—would not like to see this torque of coups remain in place. Europe—through French leadership—had shifted the borders of their continent from north of the Mediterranean Sea to south of the Sahara Desert, suborning the Sahel states into a project known as G-5 Sahel. Now with anti-French governments in three of these states (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) and with the possibility of trouble in the two remaining states (Chad and Mauritania), Europe will have to retreat to its coastline. Sanctions to deplete the mass support of the new governments will increase, and the possibility of military intervention will hang over the region like a famished vulture.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. 

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Juneteenth, Jim Crow and how the fight of one Black Texas family to make freedom real offers lessons for Texas lawmakers trying to erase history from the classroom

By Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Sam Houston State University and Zachary Montz, Sam Houston State University

The news was startling.

On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil War ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people of the state that “all slaves are free.”

As local plantation owners lamented the loss of their most valuable property, Black Texans celebrated Granger’s Juneteenth announcement with singing, dancing and feasting. The 182,566 enslaved African Americans in Texas had finally won their freedom.

One of them was Joshua Houston.

He had long served as the enslaved servant of Gen. Sam Houston, the most well-known military and political leader in Texas.

Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Granger’s proclamation.

It was read aloud at the local Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union Gen. Edgar M. Gregory, the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas.

If Juneteenth meant anything, it meant at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.

Joshua Houston and his family in October 1898. Courtesy of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library, Huntsville, Texas

But there was more too.

The promise of freedom meant that more work needed to be done. Families needed to be reunited. Land needed to be secured. Children needed to be educated.

Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son Samuel Walker Houston.

The violent white reaction to Black political power

Within a year of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story house on the adjoining lot.

He helped found the Union Church, the first Black-owned institution in the city, as well as a freedmen’s school to begin educating African American children.

In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of Black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the county’s first Black county commissioner, a powerful position in local governance.

Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political story was hardly unique.

In the two decades following emancipation, 52 Black men served in the state Legislature or the state’s constitutional conventions.

But that number had fallen to two by 1882.

Opposition to Black freedom had been a powerful force in the state’s political culture since emancipation.

Armstead Barrett, a former slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an enraged white man had reacted to Granger’s Juneteenth order by riding past a celebrating Black woman and murdering her with his sword.

In 1871, the violence continued when the white citizens of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and aided the escape of three men who had lynched freedman Sam Jenkins.

Later, in the 1880s, attacks on Black elected officials, their white political allies and Black voters escalated dramatically.

In the early 1900s, changes in state election laws, including the introduction of the poll tax, effectively disenfranchised most Black voters and many poor whites as well. Voter participation dropped from roughly 85% at the high tide of Texas populism in 1896 to roughly 35% when the poll tax became effective in 1904.

As a result, Robert Lloyd Smith was the last Black legislator for nearly 70 years when he finished his term in 1897.

That wall of white supremacy at the state Capitol would not crack again until 1966, when federal voting rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings nullified schemes to deny African Americans the ballot.

These changes enabled the election of Black officials such as Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.

Like father, like son

On an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houston’s son Samuel Walker Houston was born free in the bright light of Reconstruction.

Although he spent his adulthood in some of the darkest years of Jim Crow, he continued his father’s work as an educator and community leader. Following a short stint at Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and founded a school in the nearby Galilee community.

Houston’s school was named for him and served as one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a curriculum based on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of vocational training.

Young women at Houston’s school received training in homemaking, sewing and cooking, while young men learned carpentry, woodworking and mathematics.

By 1922, enrollment at the school had grown to 400 students, and it was recognized by contemporaries as the leading school of East Texas. In the 1930s, Houston’s school was absorbed into Huntsville’s school district, and he became the director of Black education in the county.

This 1919 photograph shows officials laying the foundation for a new building at the Samuel Walker Houston Training School. Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

Houston encouraged a practical education for Black Texans, but he also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn an account of history that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.

Toward this end, he joined with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations courses at Sam Houston State Teachers College. Together, the group led the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation’s effort to evaluate Texas public school textbooks during the 1930s.

In an analysis of racial attitudes in state-endorsed textbooks, they found that 74% of books presented a racist view of the past and of Black Americans. Most excluded the scientific, literary and civic contributions of Black people, while mentioning their economic contributions only in the period of slavery before the Civil War.

Instead, the group argued, books designed for both Black and white Texans needed to take the “opportunity … to do simple justice” by including Black history and the “struggle for the exercise” of equal civil, political and legal rights.

White Texans refused to adopt a textbook in the 1930s that taught the fundamental equality of the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it is now widely understood, as a missed opportunity to establish a more just and egalitarian Texas.

But Houston and his white counterparts were motivated by the conviction that progress, both for African Americans and for Texas, required a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.

The Juneteenth Parade in Huntsville, Texas, circa 1900. Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library, Huntsville, Texas.

An ongoing battle for equality

Today’s legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to restrict the teaching of systemic racism in public schools ignore the lessons and realities represented by Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston’s lives.

The argument used for supporting such restrictions is that “divisive concepts” like the history of racism may make some students feel uncomfortable or guilty.

That sort of thinking echoes the same justification provided by Texas lawmakers in 1873, when many argued that the state’s schools must be segregated to ensure “the peace, harmony and success of the schools and the good of the whole.”

But the opposite is true.

In reality, the prohibition on teaching the darker chapters of our past creates a segregated history.

Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston recognized, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of one another to progress into a unified and egalitarian society.

Texas history is both the story of people who dedicated their lives to the work of advancing freedom and the story of powerful people and forces that stood against it.

One cannot be understood without the other.

Americans cannot appreciate the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the vicious realities of Jim Crow society.

The lesson of their lives, and of the Juneteenth holiday, is that freedom is a precious thing that requires constant work to make real.

Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Professor of History, Sam Houston State University and Zachary Montz, Lecturer, History Department, Sam Houston State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article

Southern Discomfort: Attacks on Freedom Need Condemnation

Ari Paul, June 8, 2023

Two recent cases in the South have raised fears that journalists and activists who use their constitutional rights against police power will be targeted by the state. Worse, establishment media don’t seem terribly troubled by this.

In North Carolina, Matilda Bliss and Veronica Coit, two reporters from the progressive Asheville Blade, were convicted of “misdemeanor trespassing after being arrested while covering the clearing of a homeless encampment in a public park in 2021.” The judge in the case “said there was no evidence presented to the court that Bliss and Coit were journalists, and that he saw this as a ‘plain and simple trespassing case’” (VoA, 4/19/23).

They’re appealing the conviction (Carolina Public Press, 5/17/23; NC Newsline, 6/2/23), and they have a good bit of support. In April, Eileen O’Reilly, president of the National Press Club, and Gil Klein, president of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, denounced the reporters’ conviction, saying that they “were engaged in routine newsgathering, reporting on the clearing by local police of a homeless encampment” (PRNewswire, 4/20/23). Available evidence, they said, “shows Bliss and Coit did not endanger anyone or obstruct any police activity,” adding that they “were arrested while reporting on a matter of public importance in their community.”

Dozens of other press advocates, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (5/3/23), PEN America (4/25/23) and the Coalition for Women in Journalism (4/19/23), have blasted the convictions.

‘Anti-establishment views’

The house of two of the Atlanta defendants is “emblazoned with anti-police graffiti in an otherwise gentrified neighborhood” (AP, 5/31/23).

In Atlanta, the assault on protesters against “Cop City”—a planned project that would devastate scores of acres of forest land on the city’s south side for a massive military-style security training complex—amped up when Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Atlanta police “arrested three leaders of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has bailed out [anti-Cop City] protesters and helped them find lawyers” (AP, 5/31/23).

The three were charged with money laundering and charity fraud. The “money laundering” consisted of transferring $48,000 from their group, the Network for Strong Communities, to the California-based Siskiyou Mutual Aid—and back again. The “fraud” amounted to the defendants reimbursing themselves for expenses like building materials, yard signs and gasoline. Deputy Attorney General John Fowler seemed to get closer to the actual reason for the prosecution when he said the defendants “harbor extremist anti-government and anti-establishment views” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6/2/23).

When news broke about the arrests, Atlanta activist and journalist circles were abuzz with fears and questions (Atlanta Community Press Collective, 5/31/23). There must be more to the story, right? These people couldn’t simply be arrested for providing bail and legal support—that would be absurd. What next: arresting defense attorneys?

The judge in the case has shared such skepticism, freeing the three on bond despite pressure from the state attorney general not to, and expressing “concerns about their free speech rights and saying he did not find the prosecution’s case, at least for now, ‘real impressive’” (AP, 6/2/23).

Tensions around Cop City are already high. Its projected cost has doubled (Creative Loafing, 5/29/23), dozens of protesters have been hit with domestic terrorism charges (WAGA, 3/5/23) and an autopsy for an activist killed by police “shows their hands were raised when they were killed” (NPR, 3/11/23).

The recent arrests have only raised the temperature. Not long after the three activists were granted bail, the Atlanta City Council “voted 11–4 after a roughly 15-hour long meeting” to approve the project, “sparking cries of ‘Cop City will never be built!’ from the activists who packed City Hall to oppose the measure” (Axios, 6/6/23; Twitter, 6/6/23).

‘Is she real press?’

Slate (6/1/23): “The state’s intention to criminalize dissent could not have been clearer.”

The Atlanta arrests have received considerable press attention. Slate (6/1/23) and the Intercept (5/31/23) wrote pieces highlighting the severity of the charges. The Asheville case, despite considerable outcry from press advocates, hasn’t had much attention outside left-wing and local press, with the surprising exception of a report on Voice of America (4/19/23), a US government–owned network.

What neither of these cases has received is an outcry from major newspaper editorial boards or network news shows, calling attention to their violation of constitutional rights—although the Atlanta arrests did get a news story in the New York Times (6/2/23) that included condemnations from civil liberties groups. (MSNBC published an op-ed denouncing the arrests on its website—6/3/23.) At FAIR, I have rung the alarm that journalists for both mainstream and small outlets have faced arrests (3/16/21) and extreme police violence (9/3/21). These incidents are part of that trend.

In the Asheville instance, Judge James Calvin Hill was already hostile toward the reporters’ First Amendment claims, as he questioned whether they were actually journalists (Truthout, 6/1/23). “She says she’s press,” a police officer said in court of Coit, to which Hill responded: “Is she real press?”

The Asheville Blade is a small, scruffy left-wing outlet; are we to assume that courts will determine what constitutes a journalistic outlet based on budget, size of distribution, popularity and political orientation?

In the case of the Atlanta arrests, coverage often carried photos of the activists’ Eastside house, painted purple with anti-police signage and graffiti. This hippie vibe might not be the image Atlanta’s powerful business class wants to project as the commercial center of the South; the Atlanta Police Foundation includes support from some of the city’s top corporations  (New Yorker, 8/3/23), including Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot—and Cox, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s parent company.

The Journal-Constitution, the major local paper, has run pieces (5/8/21, 1/25/23, 3/8/23) in favor of Cop City and other aggressive anti-crime tactics. Its editorial board (8/21/21) declared, “There’s no time to waste in moving to replace the city’s current, dilapidated training grounds,” because “criminals will continue to ply their trade, exacting a cost in property, public fears and even lives.”

Needless to say, this is not the way the Asheville Blade writes about police issues. But that shouldn’t matter, because constitutional rights, by their definition, are not supposed to discriminate.

Concern for freedom—elsewhere

The New York Times‘ concern (6/5/23) for a persecuted journalist is not so rare—at least when the persecutors are official enemies.

We live in a media environment (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 11/17/21, 3/25/22) where we must constantly endure think piece after think piece about whether conservative college students are safe from ridicule if they come out against nonbinary pronouns, or if a comedian has suffered a dip in popularity because their schtick is considered “unwoke.” Governments actually trying to imprison people for exercising their constitutional rights somehow don’t generate the same sense of alarm in establishment media.

Unless, of course, those governments are abroad, in official enemy nations. The New York Times (6/5/23) prominently reported a “rare victory for journalism amid a crackdown on the news media in Hong Kong” after a court “overturned the conviction of a prominent reporter who had produced a documentary that was critical of the police.” When Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia, this was naturally covered, not just by his own paper (3/31/23) but its rivals as well (New York Times, 5/23/23; Washington Post, 5/31/23).

If our media really cared about the future of free discourse in contemporary America, and the state of freedom of speech and association, Atlanta and Asheville would be the focus of the same sort of media attention.

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‘We’re in a moment’: Is it time to expand voting rights for incarcerated Pennsylvanians?

‘When I was told I could vote, it was an amazing feeling,’ Jessie Tate said. ‘It felt so good. They gave you an ‘I voted’ sticker, and I was walking around with that sticker on all day long’  

by DaniRae Renno, Pennsylvania Capital-Star,  May 28, 2023

After spending nine years behind bars on a felony charge, one thought was going through Jessie Tate’s mind: His life was over. 

“One of the things I didn’t have coming out of prison was hope,” Tate said at a panel regarding incarcerated voters rights on Tuesday. “With no way to participate in civil duties or get a job, prisoners end up going back to what they know.” 

Tate also thought that he couldn’t vote. For 18 years after his incarceration, he watched his neighbors, friends and family flock to the polls to exercise influence over the political landscape of their home. 

In 2012, he discovered through a grassroots campaign by the Obama campaign that he actually could. Tate proudly cast his ballot for the first time since his incarceration in the 2012 presidential election.

“When I was told I could vote, it was an amazing feeling,” Tate said. “It felt so good. They gave you an ‘I voted’ sticker, and I was walking around with that sticker on all day long.”  

Thousands of Pennsylvanians will spend Nov. 8 behind bars with no easy access to a ballot box. Thousands more will let the day pass by while falsely believing that they are disenfranchised, or stripped of the right to vote, just like Tate did. 

Voter access for incarcerated and previously incarcerated individuals is a topic that’s gained momentum over the years. 

Earlier this month, Reps. Rick Krajewski and Rep. Christopher Rabb, both Philadelphia Democrats, began seeking support for legislation that would require the Department of State to develop educational programming surrounding civic education and voting for people in prisons, encode prisoners’ right to absentee ballots and give felons the right to vote. 

In county and state institutions, voting access and education varies  

Incarcerated people who were convicted of any crime not considered a felony have the right to vote. But they, but incarcerated individuals don’t have access to voting machines because of strict security in county jails and state correctional institutions.

Nationally, two out of every three people in U.S. jails aren’t convicted yet and are being held awaiting trial, according to research by the Prison Policy Initiative, an organization that advocates for campaigns to improve the condition of incarcerated individuals. 

While the numbers fluctuate, a portion of “innocent until proven guilty” Americans are denied easy access to the polls.

The state Department of Corrections has detailed information on how incarcerated individuals can vote — but many prisoners don’t have internet access. 

“The DOC provides eligible inmates with the opportunity to vote via a mail-in ballot,” the agency’s spokesperson, Maria Bivens, told the Capital-Star. “Those ballots are received to the institutions as Business Transactional mail and are handled by the facility business office.” 

Theoretically, prisoners could vote in-person, but that would require a polling machine inside of an institution. In Pa.’s severely understaffed county jails, the logistics of obtaining enough prison guards on election day could prove near-impossible for an already taxed prison system. It’s also impossible because of voter precincts. 

“It’s not a horrible idea, it’s just not a practical idea. Everyone thinks of voting at national and state levels, not considering county and municipality levels,” Dauphin County Elections Director Jerry Feaser told the Capital-Star. “We don’t register inmates out of the prison address, therefore there could be multiple different ballot styles because they’re specific to a precinct.”

Dauphin County Prison sits in Swatara Township, 2nd precinct. Feaser said that in the latest election, he received mail-in ballots from York, Berks, Adams and Lancaster county. Providing ballot styles from different counties in one voting machine is simply not possible, Feaser said. 

According to a study published in 2021 by the PENNfranchise Project, an organization that works to train returning citizens on civic engagement, only 52 out of 25,000 people incarcerated in Pa. county jails requested a mail-in ballot in 2020. 

Rep. Rick Krajewski, D-Philadelphia, explains his proposal to expand voting rights for inmates at a panel with representatives from the PENNfranchise project and The Sentencing Project on Tuesday May, 23, 2023 (Capital-Star photo by DaniRae Renno).

Krajewski called the stat “embarrassing.” 

“That’s a fraction of a percent that’s using their right to vote,” he told the Capital-Star. “There’s very little coordination [between the state and DOC] on this.”Bivens said that the Corrections Department is currently collaborating with the Department of State to develop a video to play on the inmate channel that would occasionally remind incarcerated people about their voting rights. 

In September 2022, former Gov. Tom Wolf signed an executive order that created “Vote Registration Distribution Agencies,” of which the Corrections Department is now designated. 

Since the order, registration forms are now available at Parole Field Offices, Community Corrections Centers and are available to reentrants, according to Bivens. She also noted that the Department of State provided signage for facilities to advertise registration forms. 

“We as a department are doing our part to close the gap of 1.7 million unregistered voters and ensure our residents and reentrants know that they have the right to have their voices heard,” Bivens added. 

The County View

The larger problem is county jails. The DOC does not operate or have authority over them, and there is no uniform system within the jails to provide voting information, although by law they are required to provide voting opportunities to eligible voters. 

In Dauphin County, jail officials work to ensure mail-in voting information is provided early. It’s a policy they’ve had since 2020.

“Each year we provide them [inmates] with a memo and calendar stating when the last day to register to vote is, when the last day to apply for an absentee ballot is, and we provide them with all the necessary forms,” Feaser said. “We set earlier deadlines just to make sure that we get the bulk of them done in advance.” 

Feaser provided a letter and documents that were sent to inmates ahead of the May primaries to the Capital-Star. Included were a list of candidates, voter registration in English and Spanish, an absentee ballot application and national voter registration for inmates who reside in another state. The package also included comprehensive details on which inmates were eligible to vote and key dates throughout the election process. 

The final document informs prisoners that there is “personal delivery of items” between the jail and the elections officers to “reduce any chance of items being lost in the mail.” 

It takes a high level of cooperation between the jail and the board of elections. Either Feaser or his deputy coordinates with a prison official that’s appointed by the warden. Feaser called it “a solid chain of custody.” 

Official election mail is also prioritized by jail officials, since the actual absentee ballots go through the U.S. mail. The prison mail system understands that if mail has an official election mail insignia on it, it can be pushed through without the typical searches that other mail undergoes, Feaser said. 

However, Dauphin County is just one of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. The PENNfranchise Project included in their study an analysis of the 46 county jails across the state, classifying their overall election policies as either “detailed,” “vague” or “none.” Dauphin was included in the “vague” category, as were 12 others. Only seven counties were “detailed.” 

Twenty-six counties had no written policy, although they still must, by law, provide voting information to inmates. 

Even when election paperwork is provided, it’s not always used. Feaser said that in the most recent elections, Dauphin County only got 20 ballots from the county jail, and while many ballots are diverted to separate counties, it’s still an underwhelming number. 

“Hope:” The motivating factor for inmates to vote

In institutions where there is education surrounding how to vote, why prisoners should vote is not often addressed. 

“You have to explain to individuals why their votes are so important,” Tate said. “People think their vote isn’t going to make a difference, but if 10,000 people are thinking like that, that’s 10,000 people not voting for these elected officials making laws that affect minorities.” 

According to research by the Sentencing Project, Black Americans comprise nearly half of all persons confined to prison in Pennsylvania. When prisoners vote, it makes candidates answer to a more diverse constituency, and not just legislative candidates, said Leigh Owens, the executive director of the PennFranchise Project, during a May 23 panel discussion at the state Capitol. 

“People don’t know that judges and district attorneys get voted in and out as well,” Owens said.

Tate echoed his sentiment, noting that during his time in prison he was upset to discover that individuals were serving a lesser sentence for what he considered more egregious crimes and that judges whom he believed were biased could be voted out. Tate also noted racial disparities in prison. 

Pennsylvania has a 8.5:1 ratio of Black to white prisoners, according to the Sentencing Project. In the state that’s ranked 13th nationally for mass incarceration, that adds up. 

“This goes back to prison gerrymandering, which disproportionately impacted Black and brown incarcerated people,” Krajewski said. “This could be a very powerful racial justice initiative.”

Voting can also help incarcerated individuals gain a sense of hope, which Tate said he had so little of stepping out of prison. 

“For me, voting kind of restores some powers,” Tate said. “When you realize that you can look at voting records in the House or Senate and if you see something that gives minorities a disadvantage, we could vote them out.” 

Inmates with a felony conviction cannot vote while incarcerated. The moment they leave prison, their voting rights come back, but that’s often unclear.

 In Tate’s experience the option to register to vote was lost somewhere in paperwork and list of things to do. While he acknowledges that he can be blamed for not inquiring about his voting rights, Tate said starting the conversation while inmates are still incarcerated is vital.

“When individuals get out of jail, they have a laundry list of things to do, especially on parole,” Tate said. “If you start in prison and talk about voting rights, you’ll get individuals that come out with a different mindset and start voting.” 

Included in Krajewski’s legislation  is a proposal to codify the right of incarcerated individuals to vote by absentee ballot. 

“The more we can point to the law and the foundation of our sentencing code to say this is a right that every incarcerated person deserves to have, the easier it is to defend it,” Krajewski said. “Then we have some defense in court when something like this will inevitably be challenged.” 

The case for a constituency that includes felons

The second part of the proposal would allow all incarcerated individuals, including felons, to vote. 

“I believe we’re in a moment in [Pennsylvania]. and in the country where we’re realizing that retribution is not always the best path to justice,” Krajewski said. “It’s compassionate rehabilitation, and what it means to enfranchise people and give them the ability to vote is part of that conversation.” 

Krajewski said allowing felons to vote in the commonwealth would be a “home run,” but that he’s willing to engage in conversation on his plan. 

“I want to work to make this a priority, whether it’s this session or the next,” he said. “It’s going to take some work to make this happen.” 

There are few examples nationally of laws allowing all incarcerated individuals to vote — 

Currently, only Maine, Vermont, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico allow felons to vote while they are serving their sentences. Since most convicted felons are housed in state correctional facilities, the process would be similar to what the Pennsylvania Corrections Department currently has in place for inmates. 

Passing the bill will take hard work and time, with a slim majority favoring the Democrats in the house and many Republicans opposed.

Jason Gottesman, a spokesperson of state House Republicans, said that inmate voting access was “nowhere near” the top of a list of identified problems noted in a House Republican review of Pa.’s election laws. 

“Pennsylvania’s House Democrats, who have also proposed paying incarcerated Pennsylvanians $21 per hour for prison work, continue to push an extreme agenda focused more on helping people incarcerated for breaking Pennsylvania’s laws than on people who want to have safe communities free of crime and violence” Gottesman said. “This House Democrat thought experiment is another extreme proposal that does nothing to help solve real problems being faced by law-abiding Pennsylvanians.” 

If the bill makes it through the House, it would face a hurdle in the Republican-controlled state . Senate, but Krajewski is both hopeful and said he remains open to conversation. 

This article originally appeared at PennCapital-star.com, on May 30th, 2023

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Building Class Conscious Cooperatives

Written by Kali Akuno Executive Director, Cooperation Jackson

A message in honor of Cooperation Jackson’s 9th anniversary and International Workers Day 2023

This essay is dedicated to two titans of the Proletarian Revolution and the Black Liberation Movement: Saladin Muhammad and Tim Schermerhorn. 

Monday, May 1, 2023 will mark the 9th anniversary of Cooperation Jackson. We launched on International Workers Day very intentionally. From the jump, we wanted to send a clear message to the workers of Jackson and the world, that the vehicle we were aiming to build was part and parcel of the international working class movement, the movement to construct a socialist future. And while this was a symbolic gesture to begin with at best, particularly given our positioning and relevance at the time, we thought it was important to declare in order to firmly align our intentions with our practice and objectives. 

Now, to be clear, our practical and immediate intentions were to stimulate and motivate working class forces in Jackson to support our initiative and to see it as a means to strengthen the position of the proletariat on the local level to enable us to elevate the class struggle on more favorable terms for the toilers. Our more strategic focus however, was, and remains, forging unity between the organized sectors of the working class, particularly between the cooperative and trade union sectors of the movement. From our inception we’ve been focused on trying to make a contribution to the organization the working class in its totality, meaning all those who toil or have to sell their labor in order to make a living, be they unionized or not, or in some organized formation like a workers center or a cooperative - this is why we called for and helped launch the People’s Strike, which was a broad mobilization advancing the need for a general strike to meet our fundamental human rights during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021. 

However, we chose to start our class based organizing initiatives by trying to forge an alliance between the trade union and solidarity economy movements because when combined they possess the positionality, resources, skills, and tactical means to launch a substantive campaign to democratize the economy. As a united force, they could employ their combined strength to transition countless businesses, locally, regionally, and nationally, into worker owned and controlled social production units. They could also use this strength to occupy and buy-out businesses reluctant to engage in a democratic transition, like New Era Windows Cooperative did in Chicago, Illinois in 2012. Or they could directly seize those that are resistant or outright hostile to a democratic transition like numerous workers did in Argentina in the early 2000’s. 

In order for a democratic transition of the economy to happen, we have to build class conscious organizations that are ready and willing to take on this challenge and all that comes with it. And to be clear, we are talking about moving beyond developing organizations that are positioned in the class, that is entities that exist to press for benefits within the capitalist system. Rather, we are talking about entities that are aware of their comprehensive social positioning as the producers of the vast majority of the surplus value underscoring bourgeois society as a reflection of their universal interests and advocate for the construction of another social system that will end capitalist exploitation and expropriation of the social surpluses produced by the working class. We are talking about organizations wherein its members have a consciousness of themselves as a “class for itself”.

We are clear that a democratic transition will require far more than declarations or symbolic gestures, such as the one we committed in 2014 when we started. Our own experiences over the past 9 years trying to build worker cooperatives, develop a vibrant community land trust, and other institutions and tools of the solidarity economy in Jackson has been more than a notion. Our work has been balanced by a series of triumphs and tragedies, successes and failures. But, throughout it all, we have maintained that we are not seeking to build cooperatives for cooperatives sake, we are trying to build institutions that will help us transition out of capitalism.  We are not going to coop our way out of these exploitative social relations. It is going to take a lot more than just cooperatives or self-directed social production units to get us where we need to go. But, to the extent that we have to start this journey by building class conscious organizations, we want to share some principles drawn from our experience about what we think it takes to build class struggle oriented cooperatives. Here are some Basic Principles of Class Struggle or Class Conscious Cooperatives that we would like to share that we think that cooperatives not just trying cooperatives for cooperatives sake must be committed to: 

1. Serving as instruments of working class self-organization, with the aim and objective of enabling the working class to own and control the fundamental means of production to enable the democratization of society and the regeneration of the earth’s ecosystems through coordinated planning to produce the use-value oriented instruments and necessities needed to improve the overall quality of life of the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants within the ecological and material limitations of our precious planet. 

2. Engaging in active solidarity with other workers, worker formations, and workers self-organizing campaigns and initiatives towards the objectives of helping them become self-directed, democratic institutions committed to the socialization of production, the democratization of society, and the regeneration of the earth’s ecosystems. 

3. Demonstrating the principle of non-competition with and between other workers. We need to be clear that when and where we compete has to be directed against capital and its representatives to deliberately break capital’s domination over the means of production and the relations of production. On a practical level, this type of competition must entail supporting the organizing initiatives of the workers in the firms we are struggling against to help them unionize and take over the enterprise and turn it into a worker cooperative. These worker cooperatives must be willing and able to become social production enterprises willing to engage in participatory planning processes to manage the economy. 

4. Encouraging all existing unions, worker centers, and other worker formations to organize themselves to seize (socialize) the means of production by converting their workplaces into cooperatives or commons or social based sites of production, and support them with training materials, resource mobilization, mutual aid, consultative advice, and strategic deployment when and where necessary. 

5. Organizing the un and under organized sectors of the working class, who constitute the vast majority of the class, particularly in the US, into vehicles of self organization that best fit their local conditions and enable them to engage successfully in the class struggle at every progressive stage of our development and scale of deployment. 

Oriented in this fashion, cooperatives can do more than just maximize returns for their members, which is the standard orientation of cooperatives following the entrepreneurial school of thought that dominates how most cooperatives are trained, developed, and positioned. The adoption of this orientation we argue, wil help bridge, and eventually, eliminate the historic divide between the cooperative and trade union movements in the US that started in the 1860’s, with the rise of craft unions, and was formalized in the 1930’s after the compromises and concessions made by leading elements of the trade union movement to facilitate the institutionalization of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), or the Wagner Act. 

The main compromise committed by the forces of the AFL-CIO in adopting the Wagner Act, was agreeing to the concession of keeping the trade unions from acting as a class. Instead, it compelled the trade unions to act as individual, largely isolated organizations that bargained with private employers on their own, by dividing essential tasks and roles into specialities and divisions, even within one corporation. So, instead of one bargain unit holding ground at Ford Motors or Walmart for instance, the law enabled and encouraged shop workers, truckers, clerks, etc. to each form their own bargaining units to compete with each other and negotiate with ownership and management. The act implicitly forbade formations like the International Workers of the World (IWW), which called for workers to organize under the banner of “one big tent”, to  work in unison to transform the economy, society, and the state. Since the 1930’s, most trade union bosses have viewed efforts by workers to form cooperatives as either a distraction, because of their struggles to grow to scale due to their lack of access to capital, or as outright enemies when they grow to scale and appear to steal market share from their employers. Given the present weaknesses of both the trade union and cooperative movements, particularly as it relates to membership scale and density, both of these sectors desperately need each other, if only to give themselves more leverage to contend with capital. So, it is pivotal that those of us in the cooperative and solidarity economy sector be clear about how and why we want and need to engage the trade union movement in particular, and workers movement in general overall. The road is clear, we either unite or perish, because our present conditions necessitate that we build ecosocialism or face extinction. 

As our dear comrade, ally and mentor Tim Schermerhorn used to say, “the working class has to use all of the tools in our toolkit, and all of the weapons in our arsenal” to unite the working class and defeat the forces of capitalism and imperialism in order to usher in a new world. We hope this little contribution shared on the occasion of International Workers Day 2023 and the 9th anniversary of Cooperation Jackson will help stimulate some much needed debate first and foremost amongst the cooperative and solidarity economy sectors of the working class about what it will take to transform the economy, and more broadly amongst the billions of toilers of the world, about what is needed to hasten our unity and bring the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the death cult of capitalism to an end. 

This essay originally published by Cooperation Jackson, on May 1st, 2023.  

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