We, the People, can unplug the war machine

Who is better poised to enforce human rights in Israel than labor leaders in the United States?

The world has watched in horror as a day of mass trauma for Isreal has escalated into an outright genocide of Palestinians living in Gaza. People around the world have taken to the streets by the millions in a global movement unrivaled by any since we tried to stop the American invasion of Iraq 20 years ago.

Against this backdrop, Congress is racing to affirm its support for human rights abuses abroad, while perversely condemning Americans for using their basic constitutional rights in defense of human rights. Policymakers today are ignorantly embracing some of the worst parts of our country’s disappointing history.

Like every war, the battle to stop the genocide in Gaza presents a test of democracy. Will the will of the people reign supreme, or instead, that of the military-industrial complex?

The answer has revealed itself in every previous era—but this one might be different, if we prove bold enough to force an industrial reckoning. Three particular figures might hold the keys to holding Biden accountable to international human rights principles that he & Netanyahu have seen fit to abandon.

Washington’s support for Israel denies Americans our unmet social needs

Every war pits propaganda against insight and information. Many Americans, including nearly every Member of Congress, have been whipped into a war-hungry frenzy not only by attacks that shocked the Israeli military establishment, but also sustained waves of disinformation in its wake, from sources including major news outlets and the President of the United States.

Meanwhile, others recall the grotesque share of our national budget and economy dedicated to weapons, and the accompanying starvation of so many social needs from housing to education.

Our contemporary crises did not invent themselves. For better or worse, our deepest challenges are rooted in the militarism that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized as an evil enabling, and enabled by, its twins: racism and capitalism.

The U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional source of carbon pollution. It drives the mounting global climate catastrophe (which it recognizes as a threat to national security) both indirectly (through its mission to open the world’s resources to commerce) and directly (by burning more fossil fuels than any other institution on Earth).

Militarism also infects domestic policing. For instance, weapons & tactics used in Palestine by the Israel Defense Force often find their way to U.S. streets. American police departments routinely train with their Israeli counterparts, revealing the perverse principle of paramilitary occupation implicit in urban policing. In addition, many police officers are themselves veterans, bringing formal military training in armed occupation to civilian policing and generally peaceful American streets.

Finally, militarism sucks the blood out of the federal budget, starving every other competing need that has gone unmet as a result of Washington’s bipartisan commitments. Healthcare looms as the most conspicuous, but any number of other critical arenas—from housing to hunger—also demonstrate the point.

Record—and rising—levels of homelessness are driven directly by the federal government abandoning public housing a generation ago. Birth rates are collapsing, while suicide rates are climbing. Would more people choose to stay alive, and bring new life into this world, if their basic needs were assured?

Our country’s embarrassing educational performance also finds roots in the endless sponge of military spending that indirectly forces teachers to pay for school supplies out of their own pockets. Parents are hosting bake sales while the Pentagon can’t even keep track of its (expensive yet also obsolete) fighter planes.

America mouths support for democracy and human rights, while abandoning both principles both here at home and around the world. If America cared about either of them, we’d at least have a right to healthcare, like every country on Earth that calls itself a democracy.

A resurgent movement for peace

Many insightful critics of U.S. foreign policy today feel powerless, limited to hushed conversations with friends, or perhaps outraged screeds on social media.

Others have taken to the streets by the millions to declare their dissent. But even their voices are muted within the halls of Congress—so much so, that congressional support for Israel (human rights be damned) remains nearly unanimous.

Coming together to show solidarity often offers connections, begets further grassroots opportunities, and can expose a movement’s goals to the broader public. But we can’t pretend that ephemeral protests have ever stopped a war.

While the war machine might seem inexorable to each of us, there is one body of people in the world poised to unplug it, if we discover the collective will to exercise our power on behalf of peace: We, the working people of the United States of America.

After decades of relentless predation by corporations, and their representatives wielding offices on behalf of them, their shareholders, and their executives, the working class in the United States has been decimated. Homelessness is surpassing record highs, and those of us lucky enough to have a roof over our head often find ourselves wondering how much longer we will remain underneath it.

To be fair, that’s a privileged position relative to Gazans who wonder whether the roofs over their heads will be there the next day. But we who struggle to make ends meet in America are subject to a similar precarity, even if it is economic rather than military in nature.

Ultimately, it is that economic precarity of working people in the United States that largely impedes Americans from exercising collective action.

That, of course, is very much by design.

E pluribus unum: From many, one

Historically, the organized labor movement helped buttress many intersectional movements seeking solidarity, including those seeking rights for the economic precariat. Organized labor has endured setbacks as labor participation in the United States has eroded, but 2023 is not only the year of an Israeli genocide on Gaza.

This is also a year of historic mobilizations by organized labor, the likes of which have not been seen in generations.

Will unions act only to protect the narrow economic interests of their members vis-à-vis their respective employers, or will they remember what solidarity means, and come together in the defense of human rights principles that only they can enforce meaningfully today?

A year ago, I would have dismissed the possibility of organized labor declaring and supporting a general strike as unfathomable. But we are in a different time today. 

Labor unions from Hollywood to the mountains of Appalachia have gone on strike seeking their rights, while rail workers connecting those coasts also sought the right to strike before being denied by a president seemingly not interested in his own reelection.

This year’s particular strikes by actors and writers in Hollywood, and auto workers across the country, indicate high watermarks in recent labor mobilization. Together, they suggest an organizational capacity and political willingness for organized labor to mount resistance to capital of the sort it has not been able to in decades.

Three leaders who have fought Wall Street—and won

The leadership of three particular labor visionaries stands out. To a greater degree than any of their colleagues in the movement, they have not only championed the rights of workers in their respective unions, but also mounted prolific challenges to capital and made historically significant impacts.

Over the past month, Shawn Fain at United Auto Workers UAW led a series of “stand-up” strikes from the three major American auto manufacturers that successfully pitted them against each other and ultimately forced each of them to offer unprecedented contracts to their workers. Under Fain’s leadership, UAW won raises, as well as a series of other concessions that workers had sought for years, such as better retirement benefits.

Under the last presidential administration, Sara Nelson from the Association of Flight Attendants union proved instrumental in ending a government shutdown. Democrats claimed credit despite enabling a criminal president in Washington, while a network of mostly women ultimately did the work of forcing him to heel. At the time, Nelson showed a stronger spine than the rest of the labor movement put together.

Finally, Chris Smalls is the visionary grassroots organizer who established the Amazon Labor Union despite headwinds that prevented every previously established union from ever organizing an Amazon worksite. Under Smalls’ leadership, the ALU has breathed new life into the labor movement far beyond Amazon, and helped inspire some of the recent energy in other unions, like UAW, that have been rediscovering their militant roots.

Fain & Nelson each mobilized their unions into their most active postures in decades, while Smalls created a new one where others had failed. The historic UAW strike succeeded in winning better contracts for workers, while the flight attendants forced the hand of a criminal president to end a government shutdown.

What else could striking workers make possible?

Smalls, Nelson, and Fain have time and again proven themselves to be prolific fighters for working people. One hopes they might be fighters for human rights, as well.

Few figures are better poised than the three of them to lead the labor movement to a new era of solidarity. They are uniquely poised to invite other sectors of organized labor to walk off the job until Washington sees fit to finally respect international human rights by joining the rest of the world that has repeatedly called for cease-fires in Gaza that Washington has effectively blocked.

A land of the free and home of the brave?

250 years ago, Americans discovered our collective power and revolted from a far off empire, establishing what its founders dreamed would be a Republic dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Benjamin Franklin warned of the risk of losing it, as did a military war hero and U.S. president over a century later. 

150 years after the war that established America’s independence, our nation fought a pair of World Wars. The second stopped a genocide, and culminated in the emergence of an international human rights regime that Washington was once widely proud to have crafted.

At this moment in history, as another genocide unfolds under our noses with the full participation of the United States, and by proxy all of its citizens who pay tax dollars, what will we do?

What would Jesus do? 

I don’t say that either rhetorically or satirically. I cite his example as a Muslim who recognizes the profound power of that figure’s prophecy. The most quoted voice in the Quran, Jesus preached peace at all costs.

So did his successors, Gandhi and MLK, who warned the intersecting evils of racism, militarism, and capitalism represented a spiritual poison in the veins of this country.

Only We, the people, can heal it.

But only if we discover our collective power.

Atomized as we are, we will need leadership. And few voices are better poised to demonstrate it than those from networks already established to champion solidarity.

Will that solidarity show itself now, when it is needed most?

Paid subscribers can access a series of musical labor anthems that I’ve collected. While I write primarily about law and politics, it is culture that ultimately drives them both—and few examples outshine these demonstrations of cultural resistance to the corruption of corporate capital.