[109] Democracy?

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Three months ago, Lindsay and I volunteered for Shareef Akeel’s campaign at the Michigan Democratic Party Convention in downtown Detroit. Akeel is a candidate for the Wayne State University Board of Governors. He is a human rights attorney who has pledged to protect Muslim and Arab college students - and to push the campus to divest from companies profiting from occupation and genocide in Palestine.
Members of Students for Justice in Palestine recruited allies from the community to come to the convention and gather signatures from delegates, so that Akeel would qualify for the ballot. We met other volunteers who have known Akeel for decades, including co-workers, neighbors and his nephew Muhammed, who is a student at Wayne State. His campaign manager is in her 30s and she’s known Akeel since she was three.
Lindsay and I had never met Shareef Akeel, but we heard him speak briefly at an interfaith iftar at a local mosque in March. We were compelled to show up on that Sunday morning at the Michigan Democratic Convention because we've attended several Board of Governors meetings at Wayne State University – and we've watched these elected officials repeatedly dismiss the testimony of Arab and Muslim students, some of whom have family members who are being displaced and murdered in Gaza.
I do not belong to the Democratic Party. These days, when it comes to electoral politics, I'm not really sure where I belong.
However, I decided that it would be well worth my time to volunteer for this Democrat running for this office because he is not beholden to corporate sponsors or the Zionist lobby. I believe that this Democrat will make a difference for college students who have been muted and marginalized on a campus right down the street from where we live.
Michigan is one of only two states in the country that still utilizes the party convention to nominate its candidates for university regents, secretary of state and attorney general. This year’s convention was clearly a referendum on Israel and the ongoing genocide.
Candidates who are sponsored by pro-Israel PACs were booed when they walked up to the stage.
Candidates who are openly confronting Zionist propaganda, like Abdul El-Sayed who is now the Dem favorite in the race for US Senate, were overwhelmingly endorsed.
Eli Savit, the Ann Arbor prosecutor who refused to charge pro-Palestine student organizers at University of Michigan, won the nomination for attorney general.
A lawyer named Amir Makled, who represented pro-Palestinian students at University of Michigan, won the nomination for the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
We were thrilled and relieved when delegates officially nominated Shareef Akeel to be on the ballot in November in the Wayne State Board of Governors race.
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Since the convention in mid-April, the Zionist pushback has been palpable.
Once again, pro-Israel PACs are breaking records trying to buy a u.s. Senate seat. They've pumped $30 million into the campaign to defeat El-Sayed, an Egyptian-American medical doctor in his early forties whose key issue is universal healthcare.
Meanwhile, members of the state Democratic Party have pushed an official proposal that would end elections for university regents. They want these positions appointed by the governor instead. This would guarantee that people with names like Shareef and Amir would not be making decisions for Michigan's universities.
The constitutional amendments were voted down, but a new proposal is expected to come up in August.
The Zionists have not limited their aggression to electoral politics. In June, the FBI raided apartments with flash grenades and battering rams, arresting eight student-activists from the University of Michigan – for actions they took more than two years ago.
Even though Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel has repeatedly boasted about “stepping up to the plate” to take on Trump’s assault on civil liberties, she coordinated with the Department of Justice to make these arrests.
Last month, I joined dozens of University of Michigan students and supporters in front of the federal courthouse in downtown Detroit, where four of these student-protestors were arraigned, released on bail, and mandated to wear GPS bracelets.
In court, the indictment claimed that these students were “conspiring to transmit threats in interstate and foreign commerce.” The Zionists have aggressively upped the ante. They went from labeling protest as hate crimes and antisemitism to calling it conspiracy and terrorism.
The Zionists must do this. Because love, moral logic and international law are not on their side - and more and more people are seeing right there their propaganda.
The indictment includes this note that students taped to the front door of the house of a University of Michigan Regent:
No matter how many times you call on violent cops to brutalize students, cancel and move your meetings to hide from students, and refuse to admit this university’s and YOUR complicity in genocide, we will continue to protest. You cannot hide. We demand divestment and will remain relentless in the struggle for a free Palestine.
This note was written by college students who set up an encampment dedicated to truth, beauty and nonviolent direct action - in the tradition of Jesus, Gandhi, King and Gaza's Great March of Return - and they were barraged by cops in riot gear with batons and tear gas before 6am on May 21, 2024 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
In this context, claiming that this note is a threat or intimidation or conspiracy or terrorism is just state-sponsored gaslighting.
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Democracy is definitely dwindling in Michigan. But this is not a new trend.
When Lindsay and I moved to Detroit in 2014, the state government had already implemented its dictatorial “emergency management” option on every single city in the state that has a significant Black population, including Detroit, Flint, Benton Harbor, Inkster and Saginaw.
The emergency manager is appointed by the governor to rule the city, slashing public pensions, undoing union contracts and mandating residential water shut-offs in the process. It led to Detroit’s manufactured bankruptcy proceedings right before we arrived in the city.
In November 2012, the people of Michigan actually voted to get rid of the emergency manager law in a statewide referendum. But the state legislature simply overturned the will of the people a couple weeks later.
There are many other stories to tell, including the one about a Detroit delegation sent to the Obama White House to ask permission to use TARP funds to demolish old houses in the city. To be clear, this crew traveled to Washington DC so they could take hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for “mortgage relief” and use it for “blight removal.”
Instead of helping long-time, low-income Detroiters (Black residents) stay in their homes, they bulldozed them – so that developers would have more land to play with. Now, the city is dealing with a toxic soil epidemic because the backfill they used after they bulldozed homes was poisoned with lead - and all sorts of other toxins too.
All of this has everything to do with corporate profit. The billionaire class wants to get rid of the “eyesores” so that it can redevelop the city in its own image.
Here's another story. Four years ago, right after we moved into our 700 square-foot condo in the neighborhood right next to Wayne State University, some corn-fed white boys from Calgary rolled up in big trucks with those edgy gray American flag stickers.
They moved into the condo above us.
These Canadians, coming from more than a thousand miles away, were contracted workers hired by DTE, the privately owned energy company in this city that is 80% Black, with more than a third of the population living in poverty.
Apparently DTE, which made more than $2.5 billion in profit last year by raising its rates (again), could not find any qualified workers within the city of Detroit.
Here's another story. Three years ago, I joined hundreds of other concerned community members giving public comment at a city council meeting before they voted on the District Detroit proposal that would be giving hundreds of millions of subsidies and tax breaks to corporate developers for their downtown projects.
The District Detroit proposal passed 8-1.
Every single member of the city council was (and is) a Democrat.
A week after that vote, I was on a Zoom call with a grassroots organization called Core City Strong. We were working to block a suburban developer who was trying to build a three-story concrete-crusher facility in a neighborhood that is 96% Black with a per capita income of $19,000.
Detroit Council Member Gabriella Santiago-Romero got on the call with us. She was incredibly supportive of our organizing efforts. She was also, literally, in tears. She had just voted yes on the District Detroit plan and she wanted to explain why.
She told us that Mayor Mike Duggan called her into his office and demanded that she vote for the plan – or else he would stop taking her calls.
She had a tough decision to make.
Vote for something that was totally incongruent with her conscience – and she’d get real help on important projects like Core City Strong. Or vote her conscience and be a leper, stuck on an island, cut off from the corporate Democrats.
You can call this all sorts of things. But you can't call it democracy. And the corporate Dems aren't just doing their dirty work in Detroit. They are carrying the water for billionaires all over the state.
Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer just signed off on two extremely unpopular projects: an extension of the Enbridge Line 5 oil pipeline that runs right through Indigenous burial sites and the construction of a two-million-square-foot datacenter right next door to us in Washtenaw County.
This week, no one was surprised when Gov. Whitmer endorsed Haley Stevens, Abdul El-Sayed's corporate Zionist opponent.
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These stories (and there are many more) are reminders that saving democracy must be about more than protecting the right to vote. It must be about problematizing who has access to the land, the energy grid, the water, the media, the city council, the cops and the courts.
In Detroit and all over Michigan, extremely wealthy white men – many of whom do not live in Detroit or Michigan – control all the resources. Both corporate-sponsored political parties are totally complicit.
A decade ago, community organizer Debra Taylor told us that Detroit and Michigan were the beta test for what would play out for the rest of the country. As always, Debra was right.
The problem is not Trump. The problem is that the party that is supposed to oppose Trump is corporate-captured too.
The Dems could not beat Trump, or save democracy, or end a genocide because they were too busy appeasing their donors: real estate developers, the oil industry, weapons manufacturers, Israel and billionaires bolstering their portfolios by any means necessary.
The Dems are still doing all of this. Because all of this is embedded in the party's DNA.
The corporate duopoly is held together by the logic of genocide. Wherever the two parties overlap on the Venn Diagram, you'll find them wiping out dark-skinned people and bulldozing their land for development and resource extraction.
It's not just the reverential support for apartheid Israel, the violent repression of those promoting Palestinian liberation, the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, the militarization of the police and the profit-driven healthcare system. It's also ICE, oil pipelines, AI datacenters and much more.
All of these authoritarian shenanigans are being done in the name of "democracy."
I believe that a small part of our political struggle in Detroit, in Michigan and in the u.s. is working to elect leaders committed to confronting the Western logic of genocide and rejecting corporate contributions and Israel money.
The integrity and conviction of these candidates – most of whom, unsurprisingly, are Black and/or Muslim – cannot be taken for granted. When they get to office, they must be incessantly supported and pressured to remain congruent to their convictions.
There is real hope that a coalition of leaders like Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee, Cori Bush, Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Donavan McKinney, Ilhan Omar, Melat Kiros, Chris Rabb and Kshama Sawant will be just big enough to throw a wrench into the corporate agenda.
If the Democratic Party is fortunate enough to win the House this Fall, it will not be able to effectively govern without these anti-corporate, anti-Zionist renegades.
With such a small margin for a majority, it only takes a half dozen representatives who refuse to compromise with the logic of genocide to demand that the party deliver real policies for poor and working people.
However, beyond these kinds of anti-oligopoly vote-withholding strategies, I believe that most of what we call “politics” is encountered and confronted outside of the electoral realm.
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When Lindsay and I moved to Detroit a dozen years ago, we apprenticed ourselves to Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann, who was posting up at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church for the final few years of his pastoral career.
From the day he graduated from Union Theological Seminary in the early seventies, Pastor Bill only signed up for part-time church jobs. Because he was compelled - by theological mentors like Daniel Berrigan and William Stringfellow - that real Christian worship and witness require what he calls liturgical direct action.
Bill believes that people of faith must break through the walls of sanctuaries and march in the streets and the halls of power - praying, singing, reciting scripture - as we publicly proclaim our allegiance to Something Else.
When Bill went to jail after getting arrested for these kinds of nonviolent disruptions, he knew he was doing ministry.
Bill has written extensively about what it means to engage the socio-political conditions of the context we live in. He says that it is crucial to clearly name the structures and spirits that occupy our country, our state, our city and our neighborhood.
Bill says that when we name the dark forces working behind the scenes, we start to move towards the spiritual dimension. Politics is no different than demon possession. There are unseen powers that drive the institutions and individuals creating policies – and making arrests.
The spirit and logic of genocide move in and through the fossil fuel and pharmaceutical industries, the chamber of commerce, the water department, corporate foundations, weapons manufacturers, the Israel lobby, police unions and many more of the institutions that orient the American empire.
Pastor Bill taught me that something as seemingly benign as real estate development is, in fact, possessed by the spirit and logic of genocide. Gentrification is directly connected to the targeted displacement of long-time, low-income residents, through draconian water shut-offs and illegal tax foreclosures.
This is not some sort of conspiracy theory. This is an unclean spirit called neoliberal capitalism.
In the lead-up to the mid-term election this Fall, thousands of pastors all over the u.s. are organizing to protect voting rights and equal access to the ballot from the cynical plots of the Republican Party. This work is desperately needed.
But if people of faith are serious about saving democracy, we need to be calling out the principalities of darkness that possess institutions and individuals with the logic of genocide at every single worship service - and at every single city council meeting, no matter which party has the majority.
If we are going to save democracy, we will have to cast out this demon called the corporate duopoly - so that Something Else can emerge in its place. 

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