Eyewitness North Korea
An American's Journey to the DPRK before the Travel Ban
Derek R. Ford
On August 1, Rex Tillerson announced that beginning in one month the U.S.
government would be banning its citizens from traveling to the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea). A few days later, I
boarded an Air Koryo plane and landed in that country for a fact-finding
and peace delegation. There were a total of five of us, all traveling on
U.S. passports. Call us skeptical, but we didn't buy that the Trump
administration was acting in our best interests, let alone acting in the
name of peace and justice. Indeed, as soon as we landed the hegemonic U.S.
narrative about the country began to crumble. Even though I had previously
been highly critical of the presentation of the country we have been
exposed to our entire lives, I couldn't quite anticipate just how different
the reality actually is. And it wasn't only life in the country that was
radically different, but also my experience as U.S. citizen traveling
there.
I have to begin with this latter aspect, because the propaganda against the
DPRK is so total, so all-encompassing, that it can make one's actual
experience be dismissed in advance. If one's on-the-ground observations
differ in any way from the dominant narrative, then it is because one only
observed a highly orchestrated and carefully curated propaganda show.
Women Workers Versus Intersectional Exploitation
Striving for Working-Class Feminism
Tatiana Cozzarelli
Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, an Indian American, is the CEO of PepsiCo, the
second largest food and beverage business in the world. It produces
products such as Pepsi, Lay's, Quaker, Dorito, Starbuck's Ready-to-Drink,
7UP, Cheetos, Aquafina, Mountain Dew, Gatorade and Tropicana. In 2016, it
made $62.8 billion in sales, had a market value of $159.4 billion, and
employed an estimated 264,000 workers. It is no wonder that as CEO of such
an important global corporation, Nooyi was ranked among the world's most
powerful women more than once.
Not only has Nooyi been able to achieve the highest levels of business
success as an individual, but she opens doors to people of color and women
within the corporation. Currently, 27 percent of senior executives at
PepsiCo are women and 36 percent are people of color- more diverse than the average
corporation without a doubt. In the UK, PepsiCo has been ranked one of the
top 50 companies for women to work over six times. The Times and
Opportunity Now say that PepsiCo "is leading the way in gender equality in
the workplace," in part due to a Strategies for Success program that helps
female middle managers reach senior management positions.
For some, Nooyi is a model of female empowerment, evidence that women, and
even women of color, can..
Reflections on Charlottesville, Political Violence, and False Equivalencies
Zack Ford
The violence in Charlottesville Virginia at a "unite the right" rally
that resulted in one death is being condemned across the political
spectrum. Very few are willing to do anything but denounce violence
that results in death. Perhaps this is our "default" moral position. It
is easy to say that such violence is stupid and has no place in America
today. It is much more difficult to understand why people put their
lives on the line for such "stupid" things in the first place. An outright denunciation of violence implies that all violence is
preventable. The common belief is that if we understand what the
"cause" of the violence was, we can prevent it from occurring in the
future. Regarding Charlottesville, the cause was a "unite the right"
rally, which, at least in theory, attempted to unite different
right-wing factions and preserve the monuments that constantly remind
us of the history of subjugation of black and brown people upon which
this country is built and of their continuing second-class citizenship.
In practice, this was carried out by flying Neo-nazi flags and
propaganda and obsessively performing the "Heil Hitler" salute, all
while provoking physical violence. Violence erupted when students and
residents decided this type of behavior was not welcome in their
community. So, if the racist rally never was allowed to occur, the
violence would have never erupted and the loss of life could have
potentially been prevented. Anyone who wishes to prevent this type of
violence from unfolding in the future must recognize that the racist
slurs and hateful sentiments which are inextricably linked with such
groups are the catalyst of the violence that occurred, and that such
forms of expression must be silenced to prevent future violence.
Building Working-Class Defense Organizations
An Interview with the Twin Cities IWW General Defense Committee
First of May Anarchist Alliance
The GDC began to grow very rapidly with the engagement at the Fourth
Precinct. I want to talk for a minute about the types of engagement that we
practiced there, but first I would like to point out the time difference:
we'd been meeting irregularly since 2009, were chartered in 2011, and began
to 'take off' in 2015. We didn't develop in a rush, despite our feeling of
urgency. In retrospect, we should have done more, earlier, and more
seriously. You can only prepare to be ready for crisis and then wait to
respond in an organized fashion. By the time the police murdered Jamar
Clark, after Ferguson and other places had already seen massive protests,
we were ready to respond in public, I think.
About two months previously, we'd tested our ability to organize a
disciplined mass march and directly confront racists. A group of racists
organized a Confederate Flag display on the state capitol grounds. The
state sold them a permit. We weren't going to tolerate that. We had
meetings ahead of time to organize a counter-protest. We had decided to
explicitly make clear that this was a GDC action, and to use our own
marshaling teams, and worked with a large variety of other groups. One
especially important person in that entire process person is the aunt of
Marcus Golden, who murdered by the Saint Paul Police Department in January
2015. She joined the IWW and the GDC shortly afterwards, and seems to be
everywhere at all times, moving the work along. The march began where Marcus was murdered, and ended at the Christopher
Columbus statue on the capitol grounds, after ensuring that the Confederate
Flag wavers were no-shows.
