Gainesville, you’ve been a real son-of-a-bitch. But I love you. We’ve had good times and bad times. You’ve been a dependable friend and a reliable crutch. You’ve been a jealous lover and a vicious monster. You’ve been a sage advisor and a snotty brat. You always wear black shirts and blue jeans. You always have a bike messenger bag full of tallboys. You always invite me to vegetarian potlucks even though I hate the food you make. You always want to ride your bike. You’re always awake. You’re always down for a beer on a Tuesday night.

Gainesville, do you remember that night when we stayed up till dawn listening to zydeco and drinking buckets of iced beer on my front porch, raging all night and planning our lives? Do you remember the spontaneous trips to the beach at five in the morning? Do you remember vandalizing that fraternity house? Do you remember that night on the roof of the Thomas Center? Do you remember when we occupied the Alumni Hall for justice? Do you remember that fist fight on New Year’s Eve? Do you remember when we made love in the middle of the afternoon and slept the rest of the day? Do you remember when you’d give me free coffee or pizza or beer in exchange for groceries? Do you remember strong-arming that Danish guy into leaving my brother’s girlfriend alone? Do you remember the insane poetry jams? Do you remember the Shamrock? Gainesville, Deja Brew lives on in our hearts.

So here’s to the road trips and the house parties. Here’s to arguing about Marx at Cuban restaurants. Here’s to Pabst Blue Ribbon (I still have the letter they sent me). Here’s to swimming in the pool in our underwear. Here’s to the CMC. Here’s to Crazy Greg. Here’s to sweaty summer nights and the drunken perfume of gardenias in the moonlight. Here’s to 3 a.m. booty calls. Here’s to nighttime union house visits. Here’s to the National Labor Relations Board. Here’s to Red Seder dinners. Here’s to the Suwannee River. Here’s to cold fried chicken (doused in hot sauce) with beer at the springs. Here’s to singing around backyard bonfires until late in the night. Here’s to the night they burned a couch in the middle of Third Ave. Here’s to the workers.

There are a few things you should always remember Gainesville. We’ve spent enough time together that I know some of your bad habits. Stay away from hard drugs. No one ever seriously expanded their consciousness through controlled substances. Don’t smoke weed every day. Biking will not bring down capitalism. Neither will dumpstering food or shopping at thrift stores. Don’t let your righteous anger and thirst for action blind you to reality on the ground. Study. Theorize. Fight. Study again. Fight again. Fight hard. Direct your struggle against those who have the power to change things. Go to meetings. Speak up in meetings. Join a movement. I don’t buy for a minute your bullshit about “not being a joiner.” Have no illusions about voting. Or the Democratic Party. Build a power base. Don’t be afraid to argue about politics. But don’t think you have all the answers. Have fun. Lots of it. Throw parties on weeknights. Never let school interfere with your education. If you graduate with a 4.0 GPA, you didn’t do enough activism. Leave the drama at the door. Sneak into apartment complex pools in the middle of the night. Have sex. Lots of it. But wear a fucking condom. Put yourself out there. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Learn how to cook. Read Neruda. Read Galeano. Read Marx. Read Lenin. Don’t be exclusive. Don’t be insulated. Create meaning wherever you go. Go to the beach. Go to protests. Learn public speaking. Get a job. But never work too hard for $8 an hour. Stand up for yourself. Stand up for your friends.

Always remember that a better world is possible. A world that is not scarred by hunger or fear or poverty or prejudice or the most horrific attacks on the dignity of human life. If you’ll stand with the immense majority of humankind in this fight for a better world, I’ll meet you farther on up the road. History is ours.

Now, little more than a year later, we ask ourselves: what the fuck happened?

A horrific debacle over a health care “reform” that was a bogus, ineffective sellout in the first place? Sending 30,000 more troops into a violent imperialist occupation of Afghanistan? Maintaining a tremendous troop presence in Iraq? The bailout of the very same crooked money changers that wrecked the financial system in the first place (and are again set to receive billions of dollars in bonuses this year, as well)? Supporting the privatization of public education? There’s much talk about how “Washington is broken” and “Washington doesn’t work.” But looking at the track record of the two dominate parties in Washington, we can only honestly come to one conclusion: the system actually does work well, but only for the rich and powerful. And if you expected anything else, you’re shit out of luck.

Just follow the money trail. Where does the money come from to pay for elaborate, extensive and very expensive election campaigns? Mom and Pop down the street stuffing a crumpled $10 bill into an envelope and sending it off to Democratic headquarters to help get the latest champion of poor and working people elected? Hell no.

Election campaigns are financed in the corporate boardrooms and back rooms of the halls of power. This is why Obama will not go to war against the banks and corporations that are responsible for turning millions of people out of their homes and their jobs. Because he owes them. He’s their man. And the piper always gets paid. Every once in a while, the populist fury gets so cranked up that they have to find a patsy: remember Bernie Madoff? You gotta have some sympathy for the guy who took the fall for the entire capitalist class of America. Think about it. Financiers wreck our economy. Millions out of work. Millions more homeless. And only one guy does time. How could this even be possible if both parties weren’t controlled by big money?

In some ways, the enormous disappointment of the Obama administration will serve as a good lesson to our generation in the sense that, with the sad exception of people who still shill apologies and justifications for Obama (oftentimes because they’re planning on careers in the Democratic Party in the future), many of us already have very little faith in the establishment and the Democratic Party. This is a healthy step forward.

If we can remove the veils from our eyes and realize that the Democratic Party is and has been a party dominated by big corporate money for a long time, we can step forward with a clearer mind and an understanding of U.S. politics that is not perverted by a faith in the Democrats to change much of anything for the better.

We just need to distinguish the difference between voting and politics. They’re not necessarily related. Disillusionment with voting should lead us toward more engagement with politics, not away from politics. Do we really think stuffing a ballot into a box every four years is going to win us the change we want?

We are the first generation in a very long time that will witness falling standards of living, that won’t do as well as or better than our parent’s generation. We will work multiple part-time jobs, even with college degrees. Right now there is one job opening available for every six applicants. Do the math. Things look pretty bleak. But at least we know that voting Democratic won’t do us any good. So let’s start looking at other options. Let’s study politics and engage in politics. Let’s stop putting our hope and trust in some “great” man to lead us forward. Let’s start putting our hope in trust in each other in order to build a movement in this country to organize, fight and ultimately destroy the power of the bankers, the CEOs, the generals and the “leaders” of this country who have sold our futures and are now laughing all the way to the Federal Reserve.

It’s a painstaking and difficult thing to build a movement, of course. But we shouldn’t shy away from it. Indeed, it’s the only thing that has ever really changed American society for the better. The civil rights movement built an independent power base that pressured government in its own right and with its own might. And legislation followed. Labor built its own unions and attracted millions of members under its banners before any member of Congress or president of either party created workplace safety laws or legalized the 40-hour work week. And this is the question we should be asking right now: how can we build an independent movement of people’s struggles against homelessness, against hunger, against war, against police brutality or against corporate greed to win a power base for ourselves so that we can fight back in a really effective way?

There’s no truly national movement doing this right now. But we can get started for damn sure. Read about organizing. Start a study group. Go to a protest. Organize a protest.  Seek out other folks who are doing the same thing as you. Network. Talk with your neighbors. Talk with your coworkers. Take a stand. And if no one else is doing anything: lead.

Joe Richard is a Fine Print columnist.

Everyone is aware of the horrible social catastrophe the people of Haiti are facing after the 7.0 earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. The disaster will inevitably go down in history as one of the most destructive natural disasters of all time. But there are questions that the mainstream media haven’t been asking. Aside from the racist portrayals of Haitians as uncontrollable looters incapable of self-governance or self-control, virtually no one in the media has delved into the long history of U.S. involvement in Haiti, which sheds some light on why a natural disaster has turned into a social disaster worse than anything we’ve seen before.

Why is Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? Why does the immense majority of Haitians live on less than $2 a day? Why does the capital of Port-au-Prince (which is built on a fault line) have no building codes to regulate proper building construction like similar cities? Why is the Obama administration sending thousands of troops to Haiti, instead of serious economic and humanitarian aid? Why are U.S. warships surrounding the waters off the coast and refusing to allow anyone to leave the island?

The answers to all of these questions can be found in the long history of U.S. interventions in the first modern country to abolish slavery and establish a black republic.

Born in the midst of a heroic slave rebellion in 1791, the Western world viewed Haiti as a revolutionary example of popular liberation and thus a direct threat to the colonial powers (the young United States included) and to their economic interests in the hemisphere. From the very beginning of Haiti’s slave rebellion, U.S. congressmen, many of whom were slave owners, debated the intentional strangling of the country as an example to the rest of the populations of the Caribbean. And indeed, this is what happened.

Haiti is still burdened today by a debt to France for the expropriation of French property in 1791 (also known as slaves). Haitians continue to pay France for liberating themselves and deciding that they were indeed not human property, but rather human beings. In addition, in the last 200 years Haiti has endured several U.S. interventions to overthrow popularly elected governments, as well as the brutal weight of World Bank and IMF loans, which always come with strings attached.

The U.S. was responsible for backing the two bloody dictatorships of the Duvalier family from 1957 to the point when “Baby Doc” Duvalier was overthrown in 1986 in a massive popular uprising, but only after the U.S. military whisked him out of the country in possession of millions of dollars from the national treasury. Since then, popular movements in Haiti have fought for increases in the minimum wage, reforestation programs, expanding public services and ending the privatization of the public sector.

This has pitted the people of Haiti against their own insulated ruling elite and U.S. capitalism. Various U.S. administrations–including those of Clinton and George W. Bush, who most recently orchestrated a paramilitary coup in 2004 to oust Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the popular center-left president at the time–have acted as the armed bodyguard for multinational companies and Haiti’s ruling class while they plunder the natural resources of the country and rob the poor and working classes. Whether by direct military invasion (the Marines have been sent to Haiti several times in the last century) or through sanctions and economic destabilization, Haiti is a rich country that has been made poor by U.S. imperialism.

Obama is now continuing in the footsteps of his predecessors by ordering U.S. troops into Haiti to serve as an occupying military while offering Haiti’s current president a pittance of aid and more loans.

Nothing in this world is ever free. As Richard Kim at The Nation recently discovered: “The new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage, and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.”

As Americans, we should feel a certain compulsion to point out that U.S. imperialism has plenty of Haitian blood on its hands and will continue to until we do something about it.

A number of demands have been articulated that would be a good step toward achieving peace and justice for Haiti. As Ashley Smith, a writer for socialistworker.org, recently wrote: “First, we must demand that Obama immediately stop the military occupation of Haiti, and instead flood the country with doctors, nurses, food, water and construction machinery. Soldiers with guns will only make the situation worse. Second, the U.S. must also end its enforcement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s exile and the ban on his party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in elections. Haitians, not the U.S., should have the right to determine their government. Third, we must demand that the U.S., other countries and international financial institutions cancel Haiti’s debt, so that the aid money headed to Haiti will go to food and reconstruction, not debt repayment. And we must agitate for Obama to indefinitely extend Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the U.S.–and open the borders to any Haitians who do flee the country. Only through agitating for these demands can we stop the U.S. from imposing its Shock Doctrine for Haiti at gunpoint.”

I think about these things every day when I clock in at mi trabajo.

For students, restaurant work is usually a temporary excursion into what they see as a “fun” and shockingly unprofessional work environment.

But what isn’t seen is that these “fun” jobs take a tremendous toll on the people who work them. Some of these people who prepare, cook or serve your food have no recourse but to work for low pay and long hours without benefits. And others just get caught up in it, crushed by a dehumanizing routine that forces them to create a commodity they are alienated from and will not enjoy.

The most widely used language in American kitchens is Spanish, which is a result of the standard operating procedure of U.S. power players in Washington and on Wall Street to systematically destroy the working economies of Latin America. By forcing privatization of former public industries in exchange for World Bank and IMF loans (which then further destabilize these economies by placing them in a position of financial servitude to “el norte,” which causes waves of people to emigrate in search of work), the American ruling class has successfully created a massive amount of undocumented immigrant laborers who, out of necessity, compete for low wage jobs in the service industry.

Socialists call this the “reserve army of labor,” which is an appropriate metaphor, if you think about it.

There is a particularly sick irony in that globalization has created a permanent class of immigrant restaurant workers who are schooled in the production of food they’d never be able to afford: foie gras, coq au vin, lobster bisque. In the kitchens of large, famous restaurants in any major city, rest assured you will find Carlos or Juanito cooking your classic Mediterranean fare, rather than Matteo or Jacques.

In short, if a person defies international borders to find work to support themselves and their family, it’s a lot harder to stand up for themselves and their coworkers. When the spouse and kids live in Ciudad Juarez or Oaxaca and they’re waiting for Friday afternoon for you to go down to a Western Union office to wire money south of the border, it’s not easy to tell your boss to shove it and move on to the next job or organize a picket outside your work when you get screwed out of overtime. Bosses know this, and they love it.

In Gainesville, they also like student employees for very similar reasons. Students are notorious for moving from job to job and never demanding more for their work because they see restaurant work as a temporary cash fix. That is, until they graduate in the midst of the Great Recession and come to the ugly and expensive truth that most of their degrees aren’t worth more than $8 or $9 an hour at dead-end jobs.

Of course, students are also notorious for not knowing a damn thing about a real day’s work. They work for cheap, but you generally get what you pay for. The very presence of students in this town serves the function of driving down wages a few dollars below what the same job in a town like Ocala, Jacksonville or Panama City would pay.

It’s a simple principle: The larger the supply of labor, the lower the wages will go until they level off at the minimum to live (generally about $8 an hour). I’m not saying that student workers should feel guilty about the role they play in the labor market. Lots of people need paying work, and as a socialist, I would never argue that one group of workers deserves different treatment than another.

To the contrary, I think students should be in the forefront of the struggle for decent working conditions while using their beneficial position to take a stand when others can’t. But at the same time, adult workers in Gainesville usually make about the same as student workers because bosses know if they start causing trouble at work, there’s always another sheltered suburban kid looking for a few shifts a week to pay for a weed habit. What restaurant workers need is unity.

Many people in restaurants turn to drugs and booze to relax or escape reality. It’s probably one of the biggest obstacles to restaurant worker unity and the possibility of improved working conditions. But then again, it’s hard times right now. Real hard.

So the next time you’re sneaking a smoke while making a garbage run or cleaning out a grease barrel, think about who is really responsible for how and why your restaurant job sucks. Chances are it’s probably not the person next to you on the line who gives you a hard time or the servers (who you shit-talk) or the cooks (who you shit-talk). It’s probably the owners who understaff and overwork you. They pay you less for your work than you earn. They pit you against each other.

And ultimately, it’s this goddamn, dirty-rotten system known as capitalism.

During the last eight years, we knew Bush would never lift a finger to strike down the discriminatory laws, which relegate gays and lesbians to the status of second-class citizens. But with a Democratic president and Congress, we have a fresh opportunity to win reforms at the federal level, and we should not let it be squandered. In the words of the rock band Rage Against the Machine, “What better place than here? What better time than now?”

It’s a good question, considering the resistance from some liberal circles to this controversial march. I’ve had liberals and conservatives both tell me, “Now look, I’m supportive of gay rights and all that jazz, but I just don’t think the government should be able to tell churches who to marry and what to do.”

This is quite possibly the biggest load of horseshit of our generation. And interestingly enough, it’s a similar argument used by the people who defended Jim Crow segregation laws, especially the laws that banned interracial marriage. It was only in 1967 that these anti-miscegenation laws were overturned in a Supreme Court ruling, which struck down the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. It’s the same old argument of, “I know some things aren’t good right now, but the government shouldn’t be able to tell private institutions what to do.”

Oh really? How the hell else did black folks do away with segregated lunch counters, buses, hospitals, schools and military jobs? It’s a ridiculous back-door justification for the idea that separate is equal, and it should not be tolerated.

Others have told me, “Oh, we should just wait and see. Maybe Obama will do something about it. Give him some time.” How long exactly do we have to wait for Obama to do the right thing, especially considering his track record so far? Letting torturers off the hook, stepping up the rich men’s war in Afghanistan, caving in without so much as a playground slapping match to the filthy crooks in the health care lobby, the bailout drunk bankers, the real estate lobby, and the sniveling gangsters in the Chamber of Commerce.

Considering what he’s already done, or perhaps what he hasn’t done, I’d say it’s about high time to put some heat on Obama through mass mobilizations, Congressional sit ins and outpourings of public protest. If these cynical posers who are disrupting health care town hall meetings are getting media attention through their disgusting practices, let’s show Obama what real pressure actually looks like.

I’ve also encountered a more radical critique of the calls for this march, which argues that people should not participate because the fight for gay rights shouldn’t include marriage equality as one of its demands, as the two partner marriage reinforces hetero-normative relationships (presumably like the Leave It To Beaver style nuclear family, with a white-picket-fenced house and a loyal dog).

As a straight, young, single college male, I don’t want to do anything that encourages hetero-normative behavior. After working as a dish-pit stiff at my catering job and witnessing dozens of stale weddings, I have no intention of ever being hetero-normative. I’m just not the marrying type (in fact, after a particularly bad wedding this summer, I decided that I actually prefer attending funerals rather than weddings). At least at funerals you don’t have to witness the pathetically intoxicated groom stand in front of a room of wedding guests and attempt to sing “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton to his ashen faced bride. Or the attendees at the wedding glaring at you while you take a cherished smoke break, because yes, your apron is spattered with blood and food particles, and yes, you are sweaty and filthy, and yes, you are the unattractive character that actually cooked the food that they will be eating all night.

However, I do also feel that people are entitled to a legal relationship that guarantees them legal benefits like tax breaks, which they simply do not have access to without marriage. It’s a fairly recent historical phenomenon that people view marriage as a relationship that has anything to do with love or romance, and in fact, many people still do not view it this way (just take a look at all the news stories of the last few years documenting various Republican Congressmen having sexual encounters with prostitutes and/or aides and staffers).

I’m not arguing that marriage should be divorced from love either. I’m simply pointing out that marriage has proven to be a remarkably flexible institution capable of adapting to the social relationships of the times, and to have a view of it as a timeless cornerstone of our society (as so many people do) is to be stubbornly ignorant at best, or just pissing in the wind at worst. Besides, even Iowa has legally protected gay marriage, and last I heard the social threads of the state have not unraveled and anarchy does not prevail.

Whether we personally intend to ever get married or not, whatever our sexual orientation, the option should be open to us. And the fact that it is not for gays and lesbians in this country at a federal level is an embarrassing blight for our country. Yes, this is a reform, and as such, it is not a complete solution to the problems, but it is a good step forward.

If you’re interested in joining us in D.C. for what should be an historic moment in the struggle for gay rights, send an email to gainesvilleiso@gmail.com. We could use your help.