File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9805, message 101


Date: Wed, 06 May 1998 13:18:58 -0400
From: "Charles Brown" <charlesb-AT-CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us>
Subject: M-TH: Fwd: new article


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Date: Sun, 26 Apr 1998 11:04:57 -0700
To: charlesb-AT-CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
From: dbacon-AT-igc.apc.org (David Bacon)
Subject: new article

Hi Charles -

I'm getting your stuff fine.  I thought you might be interested in this.

David


ANTI-226 AND ANTI-227 CAMPAIGNS BEGIN TO JOIN FORCES ON THE GROUND
By David Bacon

        OAKLAND, CA (4/25/98) -- As the television ads opposing Proposition
226 begin to air, a divergent strategy for defeating it is taking shape
among campaigners on the ground.
        The initiative would make labor participation in lobbying and
electoral politics much more difficult, by requiring unions to obtain the
signature of each member every year authorizing the use of dues money for
political purposes.  The new ads question the funding for the initiative,
pointing out that Republican tycoons and lobbyists close to House Speaker
Newt Gingrich have put up much of the money to get it on the ballot, not
only in California, but in many other states as well.
        What the ads don't do is to connect the proposition to the other
tycoon-financed measure on the state ballot - Proposition 227, funded by
Silicon Valley software magnate Ron Unz.  The Unz initiative would
effectively eliminate bilingual education.
        While the two blockbuster propositions would seem to have little in
common, opponents increasingly see them as related threats.  Opposition to
226 comes mostly from union members, while teachers and immigrant rights
activists have been the core of the anti-227 campaign.
        Yet in big anti-226 kickoff rallies in recent weeks in Los Angeles,
San Francisco and Oakland, both unionists and advocates of immigrant rights
shared the platform, linking the two together.  "The demographics of the
state's population are making many of us see a connection between the two,"
explains Maria Abadesco, who coordinates the Labor-Neighbor campaign for
the Alameda County Central Labor Council.  "Attacks on immigrants, like 187
and now 227, are increasingly attacks against our own members.  And if
unions lose their ability to organize political campaigns, which is what
226 would do, it will be much harder to defeat anti-immigrant legislation
whether on the ballot or in the legislature."
        Freddy Tejada, a community organizer for the Northern California
Coalition for Immigrant Rights, says changing demographics are a factor in
another way as well.  "We expect tens of thousands of new immigrant
citizens to vote in June," he predicts.  For over two years, the coalition
has registered voters at the ceremonies conducted by the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, in which hundreds of immigrants are sworn in as
citizens every week.
        Recently, the coalition was told by the INS it could no longer
register voters at the ceremonies.   In addition, last week the Coalition
for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, together with the coalition in
Northern California, released reports documenting extreme delays on the
part of the INS in swearing in new citizens.  "We believe the INS is
feeling the pressure of Republican politicians," Tejada charges, "who fear
immigrants have been motivated to become citizens in order to vote against
people like Pete Wilson and propositions like 187 and 227."
        The importance of new citizen voters isn't lost on unions either,
who are beginning to see them as a source of votes on class and labor
issues as well.  Labor leaders like Miguel Contreras, head of the Los
Angeles Federation of Labor, and Walter Johnson, who heads the labor
council in San Francisco, are putting together well-funded and organized
grassroots campaigns for getting out labor votes.  The possibility of using
those organizations to mobilize a growing base of new citizen voters could
make a radical shift in the state's politics.
        That could eventually end what has seemed to be an endless string
of rightwing initiatives - wedge issues playing on a substratum of racist,
sexist and anti-labor sentiment to boost vote totals for rightwing
politicians and their agenda.  That possibility is giving seasoned
political activists, angry and frustrated by losing Propositions 187 and
209, a new sense of hope.  It is also renewing what has been a bitter
debate over the tactics used in those losing opposition efforts.
        UC journalism professor Lydia Chavez highlights one set of answers
in her recent book which chronicles the anti-209 campaign, The Color Bind
(UC Press, 1998, 305pp., paper, $16.95).  She believes that defeating 209
was possible, and that its victory was a product of the opposition's
internal dissension, its failure to use television advertising effectively
to reach mainstream voters, and confusion over the public message of the
opposition campaign.
        "From the very beginning, polling data made it clear that there was
only one message which resonated with the general public:  'mend it - don't
end it,'" she asserted in a recent interview.  "But for reasons, some of
which are still unclear, the opposition campaign just didn't get it
together to concentrate."
        "Mend it - don't end it" refers to the argument that some
affirmative action programs do not work well, but that those programs
should be changed, rather than eliminating the system of affirmative action
as a whole.  It is similar to the argument made by some strategists in the
campaign against 187 - that "illegal immigration" is a problem, but that
the initiative was the wrong way to go about stopping it.
        Critics accuse both arguments of failing to challenge racist
assumptions underlying each initiative.  Immigration and affirmative action
are both socially positive, they say, while the initiatives scapegoated
immigrants, minorities and women for problems rising from social and
economic inequality.
        Chavez accuses the Democratic Party of abandoning the anti-209
campaign until the last moments before the election, when it came in with
money to help air an ad claiming that Ku Klux Klan official David Duke was
a 209 supporter.  The ad, she says, kept the public focused on race, which
she believes was a mistake.  "It was clear that you couldn't win with a
negative message," she says.
        Despite voicing praise for the grassroots campaign mounted by
Californians for Justice, fundamentally she still believes that initiatives
like 187 and 209 can't be defeated on the ground.  "For issues as full of
conflict as immigration and affirmative action, even among progressive
people, you need a top-down campaign," she says.  Such a campaign has to
concentrate on television advertising to reach an audience of mainstream
voters, who are generally older and whiter than the population as a whole.
It has to present a single, simple message, and stick to it.
        Kenneth Burt, the political director of the California Federation
of Teachers, says the heated debate over the tactics used in the campaigns
against 187 and 209 is still going on.  "While we can't change the past,"
he cautions, "we can certainly try to draw some lessons from what happened,
and use them to build the campaigns we're waging today."
        Changing demographics produced by immigration is one of those
lessons.  Richie Ross, manager of the campaign against the Unz initiative,
predicts that 3-400,000 new citizens will vote for the first time in June.
Presumably, this is a population which potentially can be convinced to vote
against 227 in large numbers, since it strikes at the ability of
non-English speaking immigrant children to learn English while still using
their native languages.
        But Burt cautions that this vote can't be taken for granted, and
notes that recent polls, even among Latinos, still show a large percentage
of support for 227, as well as 226.  Groups like the immigration coalitions
and the statewide Latino Network are the core of an on-the-ground effort to
reach these new voters, as, increasingly, are unions.
        The rise in immigrant voters is part of a shift in the state's
population.  By the first decade of the next century, racial and national
minorities will become a majority of the state's population.  Already, in
the Los Angeles Unified School District, minority children are a majority
of the students.  Because this shift is far from complete, Burt says that
some opponents of 187 and 209 viewed the campaigns as impossible to win,
but ones in which a core of activists could be trained for similar battles
to come.
        "While I don't believe in throwing elections away, that core of
activists was an important factor in the victory of Gil Cedillo's campaign
for State Senate in Los Angeles just a few months ago," he recalls.  "We
had the power of labor, the power of immigrants, a few elected officials,
and we beat the machine.  Eventually, California campaigns will look like
what we did there."
        In the meantime, Burt says that the campaign against 226 is
concentrating on getting out its base, union members, while that against
227 is mobilizing immigrants and Latinos.  Both are necessary steps towards
reaching out to the larger voting population, which is not made up of
immigrants or union members.
        "Our challenge is to come out of these campaigns with more
activists, and to win at the ballot box as well.  If we just emphasize
television advertising, we won't be any stronger afterwards than we are
today.  And if we concentrate just on activists on the ground, we won't
reach out far enough, and we'll fail at the polls.  We have to do both.  If
we win 75% of our own members, and 45% of everybody else, then we'll win."
        "I don't think we can win either one of these campaigns by itself,"
Tejada says.  "Our only hope is to use the strength of each one to
reinforce the other."

        - 30 -

---------------------------------------------------------------
david bacon - labornet email            david bacon
internet:       dbacon-AT-igc.apc.org      1631 channing way
phone:          510.549.0291            berkeley, ca  94703
---------------------------------------------------------------





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