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tom gallagher
Meet Tom Gallagher, the Democratic Socialist Challenging Nancy Pelosi in 2020
Gallagher's record provides a bold contrast to the rightward drift of the Democratic Party: he was resisting neoliberalism before we called it neoliberalism
Aug 18, 2019
Tom Gallagher knows a thing or two about primary elections. Years before the documentary Knock Down the House (2019) brought progressive Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's dramatic primary election victory into the living room of millions of Americans, Gallagher had theorized that path to victory in his pamphlet The Primary Route: How the 99% Take on the Military Industrial Complex (2015). Unlike the third party route pursued by Ralph Nader and the Green Party in the early 2000s, Gallagher argued that by participating in Democratic Party primaries and caucuses, a progressive candidate could reach a larger audience without being accused of being a "spoiler" - a loss by the progressive would not affect the general election outcome, and the scope of the debate would be greatly expanded.
Gallagher now has a chance to test that hypothesis himself. Gallagher is running as a progressive challenger to Nancy Pelosi in the March 3rd Democratic Primary, but in a sense, he has been down this road before. Back in 1986, Gallagher ran in the Democratic primary to succeed another powerful Democratic House Speaker, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. As the left-most candidate of a crowded field running for O'Neill's seat, Gallagher was endorsed by the Boston Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as well as Duncan Kennedy, the Harvard Professor of Law and key theorist of Critical Legal Studies (an academic movement which examined inherent class biases in law), but withdrew from the race and supported the second place finisher, George Bachrach, who lost to Joseph P. Kennedy II, the son of Robert F. Kennedy (a name which, it's fair to say, has some cache in Massachusetts). But things have changed in the last three decades.
Following the end of the Cold War, "third way" neoliberal politicians like Bill "the era of big government is over" Clinton, Tony Blair (UK), Junichiro Koizumi (Japan), and others embraced the view that making the rich richer by privatizing public services, cutting taxes, and deregulating finance would somehow create wealth that would 'trickle down' - they would just do it, unlike their conservative counterparts, with a smiling face and a more diverse cast. This has failed spectacularly: the deficit is up, debt is up, wage growth has stalled or declined, business investment has slowed, rents are skyrocketing, and more people are starving and homeless. Nowhere is this clearer than in San Francisco, where nearly 400 people have died on the streets since 2016 amid empty, luxury developments. Even worse, by moving their respective center-left parties to the right, the third way politicians left a space for the far-right to provide "answers" to this economic failure in the form of the racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant politics we are now living through. Gallagher's record provides a bold contrast to this rightward drift: he was resisting neoliberalism before we called it neoliberalism.
Raised in the working class Hunts Point section of the South Bronx to an immigrant Irish father, Gallagher was a precocious child, always with a book in his hand to avoid wasting any time, a habit he maintains to this day. He received a scholarship to the Jesuit-run Regis High School in Manhattan where he excelled at his studies (including Latin and Greek), even receiving second place in the Cardinal's Christian Doctrine Examination (finishing just behind a future priest!), and later going on to study philosophy at Boston College. The author of hundreds of essays, articles, and book reviews, as well as a very funny book about his career as a substitute teacher (Sub: My Years Underground in America's Schools), Gallagher belongs to the long line of left writer/activist/politicians, stretching from George Bernard Shaw (Gallagher, like Shaw, is a vegetarian), through Tony Benn, to Arundhati Roy, and Ralph Nader - witty, verbal activists who held out for truth as their parties lazily slid to the accommodating right. A clear writer, with an almost Samuel Beckett-like curmudgeonly candor ("Some see in human adolescence proof for the nonexistence of God, while others argue the opposite - that it demonstrates that there is, in fact, a God, but a malevolent one.") - Gallagher's philosophical/theological intellectual background, combined with this working class roots, makes him a formidable foe to any third way centrist. He knows of what he speaks. But will people listen?
Gallagher was first elected to public office in 1980, representing the Allston Brighton section of Boston in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Affectionately dubbed "Tommy the Commie", Representative Gallagher - who was a member of the Boston DSA - became the first declared socialist state representative in Massachusetts since the 1920s and proved himself a champion of working people in the area. He stood up for rate payers against Boston Edison which wanted to pass the costs of the energy company's failed Pilgrim II nuclear plant on to consumers. At a time when other Democrats were preaching an "era of limits" (in Jerry Brown's phrase) and pushing for public service reductions, Gallagher rallied to the side of frustrated constituents, speaking in the rain to a crown of 150 community residents protesting the closure of a local police substation. In the early waves of deindustrialization, Gallagher was working on bills for the Massachusetts state legislature which would have required companies to give employees advanced notice of a factory closure (providing the opportunity for the state and unions to step in to save jobs). None of these positions earned the love of a Democratic Party distancing itself from the "left" and clamoring for corporate dollars in the 1980s, much less a Democratic Party preaching the benefits of Thomas Friedman's "super-flat" global capitalism of the 1990s - but they resonate now. When Senator Bernie Sanders - for whom Gallagher was a delegate -received 13 million votes in 2016, progressive America began to recognize itself again. That is the thing about hindsight, now everyone is a "progressive."
An anti-war activist since the Vietnam War, Gallagher has remained consistent in his critique of US foreign policy, a critique informed by his experience as a United Nations Elections officer in East Timor and as an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observer in Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Georgia, Kyrgyz Republic, Macedonia, Russia, and Ukraine. Gallagher opposed the war in Afghanistan "for the simple reason that the logical and appropriate response to the high jacking of four airplanes [by Saudi and Egyptian nationals] is not the invasion and continuous bombing of another country [Afghanistan]" and authored five antiwar resolutions which the San Francisco Democratic Party adopted. In 2008, he authored Proposition U, a City of San Francisco voter initiative which declared it San Francisco city policy that its federal representatives vote against funding for the deployment of the armed forces in Iraq. While this may have been controversial at the time among some Democrats, opposition to the Iraq war was arguably the main factor in the election of Barack Obama, and became an issue in the 2016 election as well. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 64 percent of military veterans felt the Iraq war was not worth the costs, while 58 percent of felt the same about the Afghanistan war. In March of 2018, Gallagher succeeded in getting the California Democratic Party platform amended to include a time-table for withdrawal from Afghanistan, an end to air strikes, and the cut off of further appropriations except those necessary for a safe and orderly withdrawal.
Among his most ambitious policy proposals is a "Marshall Plan" for Central America. Just as the original Marshall Plan rebuilt the countries of Western Europe after World War II, creating stable, prosperous, and largely democratic counter-balances to the USSR, Gallagher argues the US should invest comparative resources transforming El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras - three countries devastated by US interventions and trade agreements - into prosperous, democratic countries. As the majority of asylum seekers are fleeing these countries, this would make more sense than investing in private prisons in the US for those fleeing. With common-sense proposals like these, Gallagher has the potential to attract independent-minded voters turned off by the moral cowardice of many "moderates."
As would be expected in San Francisco, Gallagher is not the only progressive challenging Pelosi from the left. Shahid Buttar, the legal advocate and community organizer, has also thrown his hat into the ring. No doubt there will be others vying to be the next AOC. While California's Proposition 14 created an open primary system where two same-party candidates can compete in the final election (remember Feinstein versus de Leon in 2018), this was not used to the advantage of progressives in the last race for Pelosi's CA District-12 seat. The number of progressive candidates divided the vote, leaving Pelosi facing a hopeless Republican candidate - a missed opportunity in a district where Bernie Sanders received 99,594 votes in 2016. To avoid a repeat of this, Gallagher has suggested San Francisco hold a separate "progressive" primary before the March 3rd Democratic primary. The winner of this separate contest could then go on to the March primary with the united support of progressive San Francisco voters. If a multiparty progressive pre-primary primary sounds a bit far-fetched to you, so did the idea of a 29-year-old candidate taking on the 4th highest ranking Democrat in New York's 14th District.
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The US Needs a Marshall Plan for Central America
How much longer will we watch the suffering and inhumanity before we agree that we need to do something big?
Jul 23, 2019
Imagine we're no longer battling Trump Administration abuse of asylum-seekers on our southern border and we have a chance to "do the right thing." What would we do? How about a Marshall Plan for Central America?
The original Marshall Plan (named for U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall) spent the equivalent of $100 billion in today's dollars to rebuild Western Europe following World War II. Many complex calculations went into spending that kind of money, yet today few would call it a mistake. But why would we consider a similar undertaking in the current circumstances? The answer requires a vision of the future, along with an understanding of the past extending beyond the headlines of the present.
In his 2013 book, "The Right to Stay Home," activist and journalist David Bacon wrote of Mexican farmers finding themselves considering the difficult and dangerous trek to El Norte, after their livelihoods were destroyed by the cheap American corn flooding their country as a result of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Bacon posed the question of whether there should be a "right not to migrate." Today's situation is more complex. Migrants now predominantly come from three separate countries--El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras--and for many violence has replaced poverty as the driving force. Yet the fundamental question remains the same: What would it take to make tomorrow's potential refugees decide staying home was a better option than giving their life savings to smugglers and risking their lives crossing deserts and rivers?
What also remains the same is deep U.S. involvement in the history of those countries--history that Central Americans know, and North Americans mostly don't. The longest-running U.S. intervention in the region has been in Guatemala, starting with the 1954 CIA-engineered overthrow of the country's democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz, continuing with using the country as staging ground for the 1960 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (putting down a local rebellion in the process), and involvement in the country's civil wars running into the 1990's.
The most expensive intervention may have been El Salvador where $4 billion (equivalent to $9-10 billion today) was invested in fighting insurgents in the 1980-1992 civil war (including a secret $1.4 million CIA investment in a presidential election.) The most recent intervention was the U.S. government's clandestine support of the 2009 overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, a country where we had also trained Contra soldiers to overthrow the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s. People flee these countries today because this history has produced three nations that have in this decade all recorded murder rates ranked in the top ten in the world.
As Bacon noted, while "proposals for human rights for migrants in the United States and Canada have won some attention ... proposals ... for alternatives to forced migration, have not." Certainly not in Washington which budgets $4 billion annually on border security--and about $180 million in foreign aid to the three countries.
So, is the situation driving the asylum-seekers our problem--in the sense of being something our government had a hand in creating? Yes. Is it something we need to spend large amounts of money on? We already do. As we know, when the threat of communism was the issue, we spent big. And if the issue in Central America were Islamic terrorism, ample funds from the nearly $6 trillion we've spent fighting that would certainly be available. Why not then find the funds to create alternatives to forced migration?
How exactly? Exactly, I don't know. But the Green New Deal has persuasively demonstrated that if we want to move a big idea politically, we need to agree on the nature and the magnitude of the problem before we fight about the details.
How much longer will we watch the suffering and inhumanity before we agree that we need to do something big, call it what we will--common sense, compassion, or a Marshall Plan for Central America?
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San Francisco Democrats Adopt Venezuela Stance Diametrically Opposed to Pelosi's
It seems clear than when Nancy Pelosi speaks of the “San Francisco values” that she represents, this does not extend to foreign policy
Mar 12, 2019
At its most recent monthly meeting, San Francisco's Democratic County Central Committee adopted a resolution on Venezuela diametrically opposed to the stance taken by the city's top Democrat, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who represents the lion's share of the city's voters. The resolution opposed "any military intervention in Venezuela; all covert interference in that nation's affairs; the use of economic sanctions and assets seizures designed to further immiserate its people; and all further measures designed to impose so-called 'regime change' from Washington."
Pelosi, on the other hand, in a statement remarkable for its similarity to one issued by Donald Trump, explicitly endorsed the President's call for regime change, announcing that she supported "the decision of the National Assembly, Venezuela's sole remaining democratic institution, to recognize Juan Guaido, President of the National Assembly, as the Interim President." The second part of the Democratic Committee's resolution, calling upon the city's "elected representatives in Congress to vigorously oppose such policies," would appear, then, to fall on deaf ears in this instance.
While far from the first time that the Committee--the Democratic Party's official voice in San Francisco--has been at odds with Pelosi in this realm, the gap yawned particularly broadly this time, as the resolution passed 17-0, with eight abstentions. And only two of those eight came from members actually voted onto the committee, the other six being the proxies of elected officials, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, who serve ex officio. No proxies for Pelosi or the city's other Representative, Jackie Speier, were in attendance.
A rise in the awareness of the disastrous nature of our foreign policy seems inevitable.
The fact that discussion of an upcoming dinner honoring Pelosi was also on the group's agenda that evening lent a certain irony to the proceedings--as well as highlighting the intertwined strands of unity and conflict extending throughout the Democratic Party. On the one hand, Pelosi has garnered national, even global attention as a leader of "the resistance" to Donald Trump. On the other hand, her failure to sponsor single payer, Medicare-for-all legislation, her less than enthusiastic response to the Green New Deal, and her retrograde, interventionist foreign policy ideas put her sharply at odds with the bulk of those at the core of that "resistance."
Traditionally, our foreign military adventures have not been a matter of great domestic concern, at least when there are few American casualties involved--but that could be changing. When Common Defense, a group of anti-Trump military veterans, launched its "End the Forever War" campaign, they immediately secured the support of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. With the two left-most Democratic presidential candidates now pledged to "fight to reclaim Congress's constitutional authority to conduct oversight of U.S. foreign policy and independently debate whether to authorize each new use of military force, and act to bring the Forever War to a responsible and expedient conclusion," a rise in the awareness of the disastrous nature of our foreign policy seems inevitable.
And meanwhile, back in San Francisco, it seems clear than when Nancy Pelosi speaks of the "San Francisco values" that she represents, this does not extend to foreign policy.
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