Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism |
|
May 12, 2023: The Week in Review
A Lesson from CNN: Trump Doesn't Play
By the Rules...Neither Should We!
|
|
What makes the cartoon to the right useful is how it sums up a complicated lesson is a very simple way. 'Seeking truth from facts,' in Trump's mind, is a method for wimps and losers.
Better to use the irrationalism of fascism: Create your own 'truthworld' by assertion and repetition of the dogma of the day: war is peace, enslaved work makes you free, might makes right, women crave dominance and violence, it's been that way for a million years, and so on.
For Trump, campaigns are all about spectacle, a 'reality' show where he's in charge and we are the players on his stage. We shouldn't fall for it. Among ourselves and our base and allies, we can use rational discourse and compelling narratives about who we are and whom we aspire to become.
But when dealing with Trump and his minions, if we engage directly at all, we meet spectacle with counter-spectacle. We run the stage and script, and we make the Trumpsters our props. Learning how best to write a counter-script is not so simple. I would recommend some of Wilhelm Reich's works on the mass psychology of fascism. If you know the hidden appeal and fears being played, it's easier to disarm and lampoon them.
|
|
|
|
 |
WE ARE INVITING FEEDBACK!
Please send us your letters, comments, queries, complaints, new ideas. Just keep them short and civil. Longer commentaries and be submitted as articles.
DIFFICULTY READING US?
|
We're going to try something new, and you are all invited.
Saturday Morning Coffee!
Special Topic:
Dealing with Fascists
Started in August 2022, then going forward every week.
It will be more of a hangout than a formal setting. We can review the news in the previous days' LeftLinks or add a new topic. We can invite guests or carry on with those who show up. We'll try to have a progressive stack keeper should we need one.
Most of all, we will try to be interesting and a good sounding board. If you have a point you would like to make or a guest to invite, send an email to Carl Davidson, carld717@gmail.com
Continuing weekly, 10:30 to Noon, EDT. The Zoom link will also be available on our Facebook Page.
Meeting ID: 868 9706 5843
Let's see what happens!
|
Celebrate A Life in the Struggle for Freedom and Justice
The Legacy of
Charlene Mitchell
New York - May 13
Riverside Church
2pm-5pm
We will LiveStream the Celebrate Charlene Mitchell program on YouTube,
but not Zoom.
Click this link on SATURDAY, May 13th at 2:00 PM (EDT)
The program will end about 4:00 PM, or shortly thereafter.
Please share this link with your contacts, and others.
|
|
|
|
A Celebration of Kathy Pearson's Life
June 9, 2023, 1:30 PM
Oak Park Conservatory, located at 615 Garfield Street, Oak Park, Il
|
CCDS
Presents:
A Socialist Education Project
4th Monday Webinar
May 22, 2023
9pm EDT
A Conversation About the Transformation of Higher Education: Shifting from a Wholistic Education to STEM, Branding, and Privatizing Educational Services, and Militarization.
The authors of this new book, Dan Morris and Harry Targ,
two Purdue University professors use their institution as a case study to examine the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.'
They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education” from 1926, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then, and bring it up to date with descriptions of far-reaching changes in higher education today.
|
From ReImagine Appalachia
The agenda of this two-day, five-hour event will move participants from Community Benefits Agreement 101 towards having concrete knowledge of how to guide communities through a successful benefits process:
We’ll learn from national experts and local case studies while discussing methods of conflict resolution and fruitful relationship-building. We'll have sessions for those with legal expertise and other breakouts like:
- Opening Up Communities That Are Resistant to New Ideas
- Research and Education to Empower Community Participation
- Building a Broad Coalition Role of Visioning in Creating Authentic Relationships
- Collaborative problem-solving to ensure communities benefit from new projects
- How do we build a bright future for Appalachia while acknowledging our past?
Now is the time to put our ingenuity to use and imagine a 21st-century economy that works for the people in the Ohio River Valley of Appalachia; together, we can build an economy that is good for our working people, our communities, our health, and the health of our neighbors.
|
|
|
|
Last Week's Saturday Morning Coffee
|
|
News of the Week, Plus More
|
|
CNN’s Town Hall Didn’t Hold Trump
Accountable — It Normalized His Lies
This media spectacle served to normalize the immoral and the destructive.
By Sasha Abramsky
TRUTHOUT
May 11, 2023 - In the run up to Wednesday night’s CNN town hall with Donald Trump, I was on the fence as to whether it was a good idea to give the Mar-a-Lago troll such a platform. On the one hand, it offered an opportunity for viewers to see just how mendacious, mean and shifty this man is; on the other, it provided Trump with 90 minutes of free primetime to air his noxious views.
Having watched as much of it as I could stomach, all ambiguity I might have had on this question was gone. It was, from start to finish, an absolute disgrace. If I could scrub away the memory, I would.
From the get-go, this CNN spectacle served to normalize the immoral and the destructive. In the hour leading in, Wolf Blitzer corralled a group of talking heads to welcome viewers to what he earnestly termed “an important night here in the United States.”
Let’s be clear: There was nothing inherently “important” about it; it was an event conjured out of whole cloth by CNN executives looking to cash in on Trump’s notoriety and ability to draw a crowd. A day after Trump was found liable by a New York jury of sexually battering and defaming E. Jean Carroll,
Blitzer stewarded a conversation about the verdict as if he were referring to an obscure-but-bizarre policy question, such as the imposition of tariffs on Lego sets, or whether O.J. Simpson should have a national holiday named after him. Perhaps the most distasteful line came from a male talking head who opined that “politically speaking, [the verdict] is a loser. His closest political advisers do not think this is a winner for him.” Um? Really? That’s how we talk about sexual assault these days? As if it’s something that, with the right spinmeisters just might be somehow spinnable as a political plus?
The town hall itself was no better. Held in front of a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, it was made up exclusively of people who intended to vote in the GOP primary — and that seemed, even within that narrow cohort of the American voting public, to have been further winnowed to include a suspiciously large number of Trumpies. The town hall ended up being simply a platform for the U.S.’s only twice-impeached, indicted and recently-found-liable-for-sexual-assault ex-president to recycle old and untrue canards, as well as to turn the Carroll verdict into something akin to an aging midcentury comic’s standup routine in a down-at-the-mouth casino.
The moderator, Kaitlan Collins, who had previously worked for the right-wing Daily Caller, actually did her best to rein Trump in, and, every so often, to hold his feet to the fire. But hers was, truly, a Sisyphean task.
Trump flat-out lied at warp speed. He repeatedly spat out falsehoods about the 2020 election result, doubling down on his allegations of fraud. He refused to apologize for putting Mike Pence’s life in danger, falsely asserting that his vice president “did something wrong” by not refusing to recognize Biden electors. He claimed that he had told the crowd on January 6 to act peacefully, and that most of them had; that they were there with “love in their heart,” and that “it was a beautiful day.” He asserted he would pardon most of the January 6 insurrectionists because they had done nothing wrong and were living in “hell” as a result of malign prosecutions. He said he had ordered the military and national guard in to protect the Capitol but that “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” had nixed this idea.
Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie… It made my head feel heavy just trying to imagine how much energy has to go into concocting such a barrage of untruths. Does Trump literally spend time in front of the mirror preening his toupee and trying on lies for size?
Trump — who had just been found liable for defamation and ordered to retract his defamatory comments — instead used this free primetime platform to call E. Jean Carroll a “wack job” and told a rambling story about how he had wanted to introduce into evidence the fact that she had once named either her pet dog or her pet cat “vagina,” as if that somehow negated her ability to recall being assaulted. Then, once his audience was warmed up, he explained how the “horrible Clinton-appointed judge” had refused to allow this into the record.
He opined that the House Republicans should force a default on the national debt unless they succeeded in securing deep budget cuts from Biden — despite the fact that pretty much every economist of any credibility has averred that such a default would presage a global economic catastrophe and likely cost millions of jobs stateside. One can only hope that even the spineless Kevin McCarthy will realize this is a bridge too far.
Trump coyly refused to say what sort of national abortion ban he would favor, if any — but then doubled down on his lies that Democrats wanted fetuses to be aborted at nine months of pregnancy, or even, somehow, after birth. (Just to be clear, since CNN somehow neglected to inform viewers of this, Democrats are not roaming the countryside looking for women about to give birth whom they can persuade to instead abort their fetuses.)
Collins pushed back occasionally, and at times quite forcefully, but on the whole, she was steamrolled. The longer the night went on, the more Collins looked like she had accidentally swallowed a frog that was performing yoga exercises on her insides. She looked positively sickened by it all. But there was no relief; she had, quite clearly, been hung out to dry by the CNN executives who had agreed to this inane format.
There was no real-time fact-checking. Inexplicably, there was no chyron reminding viewers that Trump was wrong, that he was playing fast-and-loose with the truth, that he was, in short, conjuring up “facts” out of his derrière. Given a platform to spew venom largely without consequence, this soulless grifter lapped it up, taking one softball question after another from the audience, basking in their applause and laughter as he pursued his grotesque comedy routine about E. Jean Carroll.
After 45 minutes I’d had enough — pretty much anything would have been better than this. Watching the Christmas log burn again and again on replay would have been more entertaining. Listening to coyotes howling would have been more politically informative. ...Read More
|
|
Jury Finds Twice Impeached, Indicted, Insurrectionist, Lying, Losing, Degenerate Creep Is A Convicted Sexual Predator
By Abby Zimet
Common Dreams
May 10, 2023 - Amidst the world's sorrows, we celebrate the small legal and moral victory of a civil jury - which even included one MAGA-ite - finding crooked, loathsome former President McCheeto liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, which leaves unpunished only his crimes against at least 26 women, human decency, financial accountability and democracy itself. Still, social media echoed the sentiment of Joe's famed Big Fucking Deal: The GOP's presumptive candidate to lead the country is now officially a rapist.
The verdict followed just three hours of deliberation after a two-week trial. Memorably, Carroll's lawyer played WTF video from a deposition wherein a sneering Trump insulted his accusers/their lawyers and defended his stars-can-grab- ’em- by-the-pussy smut, noting "over the last million years" that's been "largely true, unfortunately or fortunately."
Good job, Mr. person woman man camera TV. Carroll's testimony was clear, calm, occasionally tearful; it was buttressed by two friends who she'd told about the attack and two other women Trump had groped and kissed - a fraction of over two dozen who've accused him of sexual assault and rape. Carroll also alleged Trump raped her, in the changing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in 1996; the jury found him liable - the civil version of guilty in a criminal case - for sexual abuse, forcible touching, injury, willful and wanton negligence, defamation, false statements and malicious intent, but not rape. So much winning.
Legal analysts said the decision was based on Carroll saying she knew he penetrated her with his fingers, then felt something else - ewww - but couldn't see if it was his penis. So, basically, saved by the little mushroom.
Nonetheless, the verdict by a two-thirds male jury finally, legally brands as a sexual predator a former president and presidential front-runner of a party that's built its venomous identity on framing liberals as "sexual groomers," drag queens as "perverts," and transgender people as threats to women in bathrooms even as their leader is found to have sexually abused a woman in a dressing room and far more GOP legislators than trans people (zero) have committed sexual crimes.
The hashtags #TrumpSexCrimes, #TrumpIsARapist and #PredatorTrump suggest America might be disquieted - "I like presidents who aren't sex offenders" - by the latest dubious addition to Trump's resume. But many on the right stuck their despicable, hypocritical heads in the sand, sexual et al atrocities notwithstanding: It's a "made-up story from 30 years ago," it "sounds like a personal problem," it's "a major win" 'cause they said he didn't rape her, so what, Jesus forgives, Hunter Biden, and from his lawyer, it's a "strange" verdict that proves he "can't get a fair trial in New York." From the crowd: "You're a fucking Neanderthal." We love New York.
The jury awarded Carroll $5 million: about $2 million for sexual abuse and $3 million for defamation after Trump called her a liar. He accepted the judgment with his usual grace: Having called Carroll a "whack job" who he never met and is "not my type" despite confusing her with Marla, the "worlds most persecuted pervert" screeched, "I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE."
Poor guy must be stressed: He faces 34 felony counts on hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, likely criminal charges for the Jan. 6 riot and trying to overturn the election in Georgia, and Jack Smith on the trail of his secret documents. Carroll, on the other hand, emerged from court smiling broadly. “I’m not settling a political score," she said. "I’m settling a personal score." We thank her on behalf of "every woman who has suffered because she was not believed." So does the profane, hilarious, spitting-mad actor Michael Rapaport, who speaks for all of us on the defeat of "pig dick and fat fuck" Donald Trump today: "Woooh!"
Strikingly, writes Heather Cox Richardson, at the end of the trial U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan advised the jurors not to identify themselves -“not now and not for a long time”- out of concerns for their safety in the face of a rabid MAGA cult proven to be violent, irrational, vindictive, and often batshit crazy.
Noted national security analyst Juliette Kayyem, “Trump’s strongest legacy will always be violence as an extension of our democratic processes.” Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added, “It’s a remarkable thing when jurors have to be cautioned that revealing their identities could put them at risk...when the defendant was the former president of the United States.” If Trump is nominated to lead this once-noble experiment in representative democracy - WTF redux - the GOP will have chosen as their leader a well-documented sexual predator "against whose followers a judge had to warn a jury to take precautions," notes Richardson. "It's not a great look." ...Read More
|
|
Photo: A joyous Mayor-elect Johnson stands with the many Chicago teachers who were one part of a very big and broad coalition that got him elected
Progressives Move Into Chicago Mayor’s
Office And City Council Next Week
By John Bachtell
People's World
May 9, 2023 - CHICAGO – “Happy May Day 2023, Chicago! May we always stand in solidarity with workers everywhere to ensure fair wages, safe working conditions, and the right to organize.
“Never forget: the power of the people is what built this city and makes Chicago strong.”
So tweeted Chicago mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, a labor leader, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) organizer, and former Chicago Federation of Labor member. Johnson, also a Cook County Commissioner, was elected mayor on April 4, defeating Paul Vallas.
On May 15, Johnson and 50 aldermen will take office. Among them are six DSA members, an Indivisible leader, LGBTQ activists, a union organizer, and other progressives, making this city council the most diverse and most progressive in Chicago’s history.
On May 2, sixty elected officials, including many grassroots community frontline fighters for criminal justice and policing reforms and gun safety, took office in 22 newly created police district councils. The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability is a new advanced grassroots democratic body and a step toward democratic control of the police.
This reform also includes a body that will interview and propose a list of three candidates for a new police superintendent that Johnson will choose from.
In 2024, Chicago voters will begin electing a representative School Board in another democratic advance.
Johnson’s victory and these significant democratic reforms weren’t possible without dramatic shifts in public opinion and the growth of a united mass democratic movement, of which Johnson was a leader. The growing clout of people-centered politics and its turn to electoral activism makes Chicago more democratic and representative.
Johnson is not alone among newly elected progressive mayors. Broad-based, diverse multi-racial people’s coalitions have helped elect a wave of new progressive mayors and elected officials in the last few years, including Johnson, Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Michelle Wu in Boston, Tishaura Jones in St. Louis, Ras Baraka in Newark, and Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson, Miss. Helen Gym could join this group if she is elected mayor of Philadelphia on May 16.
There are undoubtedly others, and their election impacts governing, public policy, and grassroots democracy. These new officials are primarily activists and leaders of mass movements, helping transform the very bodies they are elected to.
Mass democratic coalitions, instrumental to these victories, are now in a position to play an essential role in governing and addressing the deep crises cities face and mobilizing the public behind a people’s agenda, including in Chicago. The solution to those crises will require a major push for a massive infusion of federal funds needed to solve many of the problems cities face. Right now, Chicago pours so much more into the federal treasury than it gets back. Only one example of where Chicago must have federal help is with the swelling numbers of immigrants being sent here by the right-wing governor of Texas.
These victories are a vital part of the bigger picture of victories by the Democratic Party and intertwined and allied mass movements in so-called Blue states, where Democratic-dominated state legislatures, progressive-oriented governors, including Illinois Gov. Pritzker, and voters are passing progressive legislation and constitutional amendments expanding voting, worker’s, reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and are instituting advanced social and environmentally sustainable policies.
Johnson’s victory over Vallas, by 52 to 48%, was a vote of hope over fear, particularly an appeal to racial fear, and an embrace of Johnson’s vision of a more equitable, people-centered city. Most voters rejected Vallas’s “tough on crime” fear-mongering and the threat of a return to the old Chicago politics of racial division, machine-autocratic rule, corporate plunder of public assets, and notorious corruption resulting in vast racial and economic inequality, which distorted urban development with luxury housing downtown and increasingly unaffordable housing everywhere else.
Johnson’s victory represents the fruits of embracing broad progressive politics, a turn toward the ballot box, and decades of grassroots political organizing against corporate domination of politics and economics, the political machine, systemic racism and inequality, and corporate plunder of public assets.
Reminiscent of the Washington coalition
The victory is reminiscent of the grassroots electoral coalition that elected Mayor Harold Washington in 1983 and again in 1987 before his untimely death but on a more advanced ideological, political, and organizational level.
By comparison, Washington won in 1983 with 93% of the African American vote, only 9% of white voters, and 9% of Latino voters. Forty years later, Johnson prevailed with 80% of African American voters, 39% of white voters, and 49% of Latino voters. Johnson won 29 of 50 wards, including 17 predominately African American wards and 13 predominately white and Latino wards, including six predominately white liberal Northside wards.
Chicago remains one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., with African Americans, Latinos, and whites nearly evenly split demographically and a growing Asian American population. But the election also shows how much has changed politically.
Finally, Johnson was the candidate of the youth, who increased their turnout by over 30,000 votes from the February 28 general Election to the April 4 runoff. Fifty-nine percent of voters were 44 years old and under, and the 18-24 vote surged by 30%. The Johnson campaign consciously targeted young voters with outreach through social media and other means.
Besides youth, the Johnson coalition included the CTU, SEIU, AFSCME, and other unions; the Working Families Party coalition; Indivisible; social, environmental, and criminal justice reform and gun safety organizations; progressive independent and Democratic Party ward organizations; African American churches; LGBTQ organizations, and elected officials across the board. All these forces were involved in vigorous get-out-the-vote mobilization.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who visited twice during the election, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Rep. Chuy Garcia, who finished 4th in the General Election, endorsed Johnson. This helped bring in support from progressive voters who did not know about Johnson and his record. Garcia’s support was especially critical in mobilizing Latino voters on the Southwest Side, where his robust political organization shattered the Democratic Machine and elected many young Latinos to office.
On the other hand, a cabal of right-wing billionaires backed Vallas, along with leading center forces in the Democratic Party, including Rahm Emanuel, Sen. Dick Durbin, former Secretary of State Jesse White, former U.S. representative Bobby Rush, and other elected officials (Gov. J.B. Pritzker remained neutral), Democratic machine remnants, some building trades unions, the fascist-led Fraternal Order of Police, and the Illinois Republican Party. ...Read More
|
|
CCDS Joins With Four State Legislatures, 25 City Councils, 25 Labor Councils, and Other Labor Organizations Which Have Resolved To:
End the over sixty-year U.S. embargo/ blockade of Cuba!
-Save lives through scientific collaboration with Cuba regarding the Covid-19 Pandemic, lung cancer, diabetes, and other life-threatening illnesses where Cuban scientists have made enormous progress.
-Urge that Cuba be removed from the U.S. List of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT)
The painful hostility between the two countries has gone on far too long and hurt millions of Cubans and Americans. The United States adopted a policy of trying to starve the Cuban people into submission shortly after the Cuban Revolution. While the Revolution survives, the suffering of the people has continued. When former President Trump added Cuba to the State Department's list of terrorist states, minuscule trade, investment, and travel to the island worsened. And while candidate Joe Biden pledged to take Cuba off the terrorism list, he has not done so.
In sum we, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, CCDS, support all peoples and organizations, such as the IFCO PASTORS FOR PEACE, who call for a full normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba. https://ifconews.org/
|
|
Photo: Helen Gym on the campaign trail. Brunswick News
Philadelphia Election Tests the Left’s Electoral Muscle
By Eric Braxton
Convergence
May 5, 2023 - With the mayor and all 17 City Council members up for election, there’s a real opening for a progressive governing bloc that could set a new direction for the poorest big city in the country.
On the heels of Brandon Johnson’s historic win in Chicago, Philadelphia is preparing for a critical primary election on May 16. With the mayor’s office and all 17 City Council seats on the ballot, there is a legitimate opportunity to win a progressive governing bloc that could advance a new vision for the poorest big city in the country.
Two-term City Council member Helen Gym, a former teacher and parent activist, is competing in a crowded race for mayor. Several progressive candidates are vying for City Council posts.
The last several years have seen the city’s community organizing groups, labor unions, and progressive activists flex their electoral muscle and win a handful of key elections. Contending for the mayor’s office and a City Council majority, however, represents a significant jump in scale that will put that muscle to the test—and the result could set the direction for the city.
Philadelphia has been struggling for decades to address the effects of deindustrialization and disinvestment that have left 22.3% of the population living in poverty. Decades of underfunding public schools has undermined the quality of public education and created a crisis of decaying school buildings. Gentrification is pushing low-income residents out of their neighborhoods. On top of all this, the city has been in the midst of an unprecedented gun violence crisis that is now defining this election cycle. A Pew Charitable Trusts survey in 2022 found that 70% of the city believes crime, drugs, and public safety is the number one issue.
Many local organizers see this election as a critical turning point the city. “The future of public education in the city is at stake and if we don’t win affordable housing our members will be pushed out,” said Steve Paul, Co-Executive Director of One PA. “Given a progressive majority, we can push a bold vision on education and housing. We could see a vision for safety that emphasizes care and not criminalization. We know that can happen,” he said.
“We are in a crucial period where we are either going to swing to the right—you have candidates who are pro-incarceration who want to bring back stop-and-frisk—or we could swing in the other direction and realize that this is a human issue,” said Steph Drain, Political Director of the Pennsylvania Working Families Party (WFP), “The solutions we need are to get to the root of the problem. We need to focus on prevention. We have to invest in communities, invest in housing and schools and good paying jobs,” they said.
The growth of progressive electoral power
Philadelphia has a long history of labor and community organizing. Up until the 2010s the city’s community organizing groups focused far more on issue-based work than elections, and progressive unions were vastly outspent on elections by the moderate, pro-growth building trades. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 7 – 1, this often left elections as battles between various factions within the Democratic Party. Party structures that had been built as ways for working-class communities and communities of color to gain political power had in many cases ossified into a patronage machine with a notorious pay-to-play culture and limited vision of transformative politics. “Philadelphia has a radical Black tradition, but we witnessed their offspring becoming the establishment. Now you see a reawakening of the Black Left in Philadelphia,” said Drain.
A dramatic shift in progressive electoral politics began to occur in 2015. New electoral forms emerged. Community organizing groups increased their investment in electoral work—and their cooperation. Progressive unions began exerting their power. In 2016, volunteers from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign began building Reclaim Philadelphia to contest for political power across the city. Soon after, their leaders had taken control of two Democratic Party wards and had a solid base within others. By May 2018, working with Neighborhood Networks, Reclaim elected 200 committee people across the city.
Also in 2016 labor unions and community groups formed the Pennsylvania Working Families Party.
In 2015, the 215 People’s Alliance became one of the first community groups to develop a full-scale voter engagement program, connecting electoral and issue-based work. Four years later, more than 20 community organizing groups formed the Alliance for a Just Philadelphia and developed a shared platform for City Council candidates. In 2023 they did so again with a larger coalition and platforms for mayor and City Council. This effort spoke to growing alignment in the community organizing sector.
This new organizing fed—and was fed by—electoral wins. Helen Gym first won an at-large City Council seat in 2015, with support from the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and progressive activists across the city. The following year longtime civil rights attorney Larry Krassner was elected District Attorney on a criminal justice reform platform; he was reelected in 2021. In 2019, in a major coup, Kendra Brooks, a parent activist from North Philadelphia, ran on the WFP ticket and won one of the two City Council at-large seats reserved for minority parties, unseating a Republican. That same year, a progressive new to politics who championied equitable development, Jamie Gauthier, shocked the city by defeating longtime West Philadelphia Council Member Jannie Blackwell. Reclaim members Elizabeth Fielder, Nikil Saval, and Rick Krajewski won seats in the state legislature in 2018 and 2020.
In addition, this time period saw multiple waves of mass protest against police violence that, combined with decades of organizing against mass incarceration, sparked the electoralizing of movements for racial justice and criminal justice reform. Groups like Amistad Movement Power, Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration, Free the Ballot, and Straight Ahead have built significant voter engagement programs over the last few years and have put people impacted by the criminal justice system on the forefront of organizing to transform it.
Pushback
As progressive power has grown, both the Right and the center have pushed back against it. Billionaires and corporate interests have poured millions of dollars into defeating progressives and advancing pro-business interests. In 2022 they used PACs to send mailers attacking progressive candidates for being soft on crime. The current mayor’s race features two wealthy candidates who have spent millions of dollars on their own campaigns while raising millions more for aligned PACs.
In addition, after losing a few races to progressive insurgents, the Democratic Party establishment has rallied its troops to fight for endorsed candidates and marginalize progressives within the party structure. Party leaders have attempted to paint progressives as out-of-touch outsiders who don’t understand the concerns of working-class Philadelphians.
Some critics have suggested that progressive growth has occurred mostly in gentrifying neighborhoods and that it is not rooted in working-class Philadelphia, but local organizers push back on that idea. “That’s not reflected by what happens when people get out to vote,” said Reclaim Philadelphia’s political director, Sergio Cea. “The first election we are known for is the election of Larry Krassner, who won citywide outside of gentrifying areas in areas affected by gun violence—not just one time but two times.”
“The Left is a multi-racial coalition,” Drain said. “Sure there are students and young transplants, but in Philadelphia there is a budding Black Left. You see that with these formerly incarcerated folks and criminal justice organizations who really are pioneering a new direction.”
“We have to organize Black working-class neighborhoods,” said One PA’s Steve Paul. “My people talk about how they’ve been betrayed by the party. You gotta talk to people. Traditional Dems aren’t knocking on doors. We are doing the hard work.”
Crime and safety shaping the race
Nowhere has the pushback against progressives been clearer than on the issue of gun violence and policing. Like other big cities, from 2016 to 2020 Philadelphia saw several waves of racial justice protests that shifted long standing narratives on policing. Krassner won election and re-election. Organizers won a partial victory in 2020 when the mayor’s proposed $19 million budget increase for police was canceled.
Since then, however, the tides have begun to turn.
In the current mayor’s race, no candidate is calling for reducing police funding and many are competing to take tough-on-crime stances that they believe now resonate with voters. While polls do show that voters think crime and violence are the top issue, only about half of voters think increasing funding for police is a key solution and when presented with multiple options for how to address crime and violence, increasing funding for police is one of least popular options.
The election may hinge on who is able to present a more compelling program on how to address this crisis. “I’m excited about following in the footsteps of Chicago and Boston where everyday working people who have been subject to the tough on crime policies have seen that it doesn’t work, that it creates harm, and see that we need to address the root cause which is poverty and disinvestment in Black and brown communities,” Cea said.
Battle for the mayor’s office
The mayor’s race has five leading candidates. Helen Gym has the backing of the leading progressive groups. As a City Council member, she helped restore nurses, counselors, social workers, clean water, and arts and music to the school district. She championed legislation that created the city’s first mental health crisis response units, as well as eviction protection and fair scheduling bills that grew out of labor-community coalition work.
Gym’s campaign has made a comprehensive community safety plan its first priority. It includes declaring a state of emergency on day one, reducing 911 response times, community-driven interventions, supporting victims of crime, and opportunities for young people. She has also released bold policy proposals including a 10-year, $10 billion Green New Deal for Schools, and jobs guarantee for young people. Her opposition includes former City Controller and Wall Street staffer Rebecca Rynhart and former State Representative and council member Cherelle Parker, along with the two self-funded candidates, former City Council member and real estate magnet Alan Domb and supermarket owner Jeff Brown. ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Strong support for Ukraine in Norway was evident during last spring’s May 1st parade in Oslo. Participation in daily demonstrations has since dwindled, though, as Russia’s war against Ukraine drags on. PHOTO: NewsinEnglish.no/Morten Møst
Norway: The Red Party Supports Ukraine's Fight For Freedom
The Red Party
Rødt via Links.org
April 28, 2023 - The Red Party (Rødt) strongly condemns Russia's aggressive attack on Ukraine in violation of international law. This is imperialism that goes against everything the Red Party stands for. We support Ukraine's independence and defensive struggle.
The Red Party supports those who are now defending themselves against [Russian president Vladimir] Putin's soldiers and fighting for their freedom, their country's sovereignty and for democracy. Responsibility for the war of aggression and bombings lie solely with the Putin regime.
Russia must immediately stop the war and withdraw from the whole of Ukraine. There are no arguments, no security interests, no spheres of interest or other pretexts that can justify a war of aggression in violation of international law and the enormous human suffering it causes. It is primarily the population in Ukraine that has been affected by the war, but the ripple effects have also exacerbated social hardship and inequalities around the world, in particular affecting the working class. Norway must increase its humanitarian aid to both Ukraine and other war- and crisis-affected countries in the world.
The Red Party's anti-imperialist principles are clear. In our program of principles, we advocate that "Norway will not take sides in the struggle between imperialist powers", that we "support people and nations fighting against occupation and oppression" and that we "will defend international law and the right of nations to self-determination". We must stand up for these principles in practice when a major power attacks a smaller country.
Without arms supplies, Ukraine would have been overrun and subjugated by a chauvinist, right-wing nationalist Russian regime that has openly declared its imperialist ambitions. Therefore, it is right to provide arms to Ukraine in its struggle for independence and peace when Ukrainians ask for them. These weapons must not be used outside Ukrainian territory. The Red Party assumes that the government has obtained an end-user declaration from the Ukrainian government to ensure that Norwegian weapons are only used by the regular Ukrainian forces within Ukrainian territory.
The Red Party wants to prevent an escalation that could see the war spread to other countries and lead to World War III. The main responsibility for escalation of the war lies on the Russian side.
Today, arms donations are made directly by Norway or in cooperation with other countries, not by NATO. This must continue, in order to support Ukraine's defensive struggle, without further increasing the risk of a great power war.
Thorough assessments prior to Norwegian donations are crucial. No country has given Ukraine everything it has asked for. The government must inform and consult Parliament on military contributions in advance. The Red Party does not support sending Norwegian combat aircraft, tanks or soldiers to Ukraine. International conventions and laws against the use of cluster munitions and phosphorus bombs must be respected.
The survival of Ukraine as an independent state is a prerequisite for any peace settlement. Occupation is not peace. Occupation is repression, mass arrests, death sentences, and terror.
Norway must use all its international influence and diplomatic capacity to contribute to ending the war through negotiations aimed at a peaceful solution based on international law. There is no contradiction between support for the resistance and peace efforts.
The future outcome of negotiations also depends on the situation on the ground. If the aggressor is allowed to dictate the terms of peace, imperialist aggression will be rewarded. Until a diplomatic solution is possible and the basis for a just peace is in place, Ukraine needs weapons to defend itself and resist the invasion.
The Red Party will work actively to ensure that the government strengthens Norway's work in terms of humanitarian aid, long-term development efforts and lasting peace. The Red Party will also work to ensure that Norway promotes a policy in the United Nations to make the organization an effective tool for creating and securing peace, and to stop all arms exports, directly and indirectly, to countries that engage in wars of aggression and violate international law.
The Red Party supports the peace movement in both Ukraine and Russia. Norway must work to ensure that peace negotiations are conducted in line with the UN Charter. These must take place on the Ukrainians' terms.
Norway must stand up for dissidents and the persecuted. The Red Party was early to demand collective protection for all Ukrainian refugees, which was quickly introduced. The Red Party has called on the government to ask Russian soldiers to desert and guarantee them protection in Norway.
The Red Party has spearheaded tough punitive measures against the Russian regime and its supporters. We want sanctions that target the political elite, the military, the oligarchs and the financial elite in Russia. The aim of sanctions must be to weaken the regime and not to weaken the peace movement in Russia.
The Red Party works for the prosecution of those responsible for wars of aggression in violation of international law. The Red Party proposes that Norway support Ukraine's initiative to establish a special tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, where the Putin regime can be investigated and prosecuted for its war of aggression against Ukraine in violation of international law.
The Red Party has proposed that Norway ratify the Kampala Amendment to the Rome Statute, which gives the International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction to prosecute state leaders for wars of aggression in violation of international law. In addition, Norway must work to remove the special jurisdictional limitation on the crime of aggression, which currently prevents the ICC from investigating Putin for his decision to attack Ukraine. We believe it is necessary to strengthen Norway's legal protection against wars of aggression to help prevent future wars in line with the intention behind the Nürenberg settlement and for Norway to have credibility in international efforts to prosecute Russia's crime of aggression against Ukraine.
The Red Party believes that Norway should introduce its own sanctions that close loopholes exploited by Putin and his allies. We therefore called early on for independent Norwegian sanctions to close loopholes in the European Union's measures, which have allowed the unloading of metal and the payment of refunds for oil exploration to oligarchs.
The Red Party will continue to work for comprehensive economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, both for the duration of the war and for reconstruction. The Red Party has proposed canceling Ukraine's national debt and believes that this must be implemented. We have supported all humanitarian aid, as well as materials such as helmets, bulletproof vests, etc. for the Ukrainian military. The Red Party believes that financial and humanitarian support must be stepped up.
There have been several reports of Ukrainians in Norway who have been exploited for social dumping and other forms of criminality. Solidarity with Ukraine must also ensure that Ukrainians in Norway are not exploited as cheap labor or for crimes. The Red Party demands that the government, in cooperation with the trade union movement, employers and NGOs, introduce concrete measures to prevent cynical employers and criminals in the labor market from profiting from the war in Ukraine.
We demand:
- Information in the Ukrainian language about labor rights and the Norwegian labor market.
- Offers of language training in Norwegian.
- Notification channels in Ukrainian to report crime and unemployment insurance fraud.
-
Measures for the integration of Ukrainians into ordinary working life that can qualify for skilled positions in the labor market. ...Read More
|
|
Nevada's Lake Mead is Virtually Gone
By The Futurist
Getthefuturist.com
May 2023 - The American West and Southwest are experiencing an unprecedented drought period. The driest period in human history is affecting agriculture, human health, and virtually all aspects of modern life. In fact, it's the driest year since 800 AD. Yes, 800 – not 1800. Lake Powell and Nevada's Lake Mead, the water reservoirs created by Colorado River dams, are seeing levels plunge, threatening the water sources for tens of millions.
Residents in Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and California are being forced to adapt to the lack of ready water and observing the ravages of climate change as lakes all around the region dry up. With no end to the drought in sight, vulnerable people and livestock face an environmental point of no return.
Receding Waters Reveal Plenty of Surprises
As the water levels in Lakes Mead and Powell drop, an astounding array of left-behind objects pops up. World War II boats and subs make an appearance. And, more grisly detritus emerges as well, including human remains and buried bodies, tragic reminders of Las Vegas's long history of organized crime affiliation.
By the end of 2022, the levels at Lake Mead are anticipated to be 22% lower than full capacity, while Lake Powell will be nearly 30% lower than its highest levels. The Federal Bureau of Reclamation notes that these are record lows and is making historic recommendations for water conservation.
To put these figures another way, the drop in Lake Mead's water supply equates to 6 trillion gallons, according to the National Park Service. The Hoover Dam is producing less electricity due to the lower lake levels, impacting power supplies to Las Vegas and other cities. As the lake continues to shirk, though, it approaches "dead pool" status, levels that are too low for the water to flow downstream and a threat to the water supplies for communities relying on the flow of potable water from the reservoir.
A Moment of Truth: The Impact of Record Low Water Levels in the West
The Impact of Record Low Water Levels in the West
"The moment of truth is here for everyone," said Christopher Kuzdas, a senior water program manager with the Environmental Defense Fund. The issues with the drop are historic and will profoundly impact water use and our way of life. He continues, "[these facts display an] unmistakable signal that people — we need to change fundamentally how we manage and use water."
The Colorado River is vitally important to the survival of people in the West, and only with this valuable water can this region sustain such large levels of human settlement. It provides drinking water to 25 million people and covers roughly 8% of the Continental U.S.
But, management of this precious resource can be complicated.
Governance of the river is a collaboration between seven states, each of which may have different perspectives on water conservation and the use of the resource. The agreement between the states actually allocates more water than is physically contained in the river since the agreement was hammered out during one of the region's wettest periods in history. So, when levels drop, each state may be shortchanged.
In response to the drought, the seven represented states agreed to forfeit using water from the Lake Powell reservoir so as not to impede its electricity production. The federal government is moving 162 billion gallons into Lake Powell from the nearby Flaming Gorge Reservoir in response to the drought. Other austerity measures may be forthcoming if the levels continue to plummet. ...Read More
|
|
Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture: |
|
|
'Reckless': Legal Expert Says Trump 'Tied A Bow'
On GA Case By Insisting Raffensperger 'Owed'
Him Votes
By Alex Henderson
Alternet
May 11, 2023 - Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr.'s 34-count criminal prosecution is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Donald Trump's legal problems.
The former U.S. president is also facing two federal criminal investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and special counsel Jack Smith as well as a state criminal probe by Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis.
Willis has been investigating Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in her state. President Joe Biden won Georgia, but Trump has falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him there. And he infamously tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a conservative Republican, into helping him "find" enough votes to reverse Biden's Peach State victory.
Raffensperger, however, wouldn't budge and maintained that Biden won Georgia's electoral votes fairly.
If Willis decides to proceed with a criminal indictment of Trump, that conversation with Raffensperger will be a crucial part of her evidence. Trump discussed the conversation with CNN's Kaitlan Collins during a town hall event on Wednesday night, May 10 — and Antony Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, believes that Trump's comments to Collins have made Willis' case against him even stronger.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein zeroes in on the Raffensperger-related parts of the town hall in an article published on May 10, getting Kreis' insights.
Kreis told the Journal-Constitution, "Subjects of criminal investigation aren't usually reckless enough to go on national television and admit their corrupt intent, but Donald Trump just handed Fani Willis a new piece of evidence and tied a bow on it. Trump stated, in relatively plain terms, that he felt entitled to votes as a matter of personal right, regardless of the evidence laid before him that he did not win Georgia, and that vote tallies and recounts be damned."
During the townhall, Trump reiterated his debunked claim that voter fraud occurred in Georgia in the 2020 election and he said he called Raffensperger to voice his concerns.
Trump told Collins, "Yeah, I called questioning the election. I thought it was a rigged election. I thought it had a lot of problems…. I said: You owed me votes because the election was rigged. That election was rigged. If this call was bad, why didn't him and his lawyers hang up?…. This was a perfect phone call."
The former president also said to Collins, "This was a call that was made to question the results of the election. When we can't make a call to question the election results, then this country ought to just forget about it." ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Photo: Rep. Rashida Tlaib speaks during an event commemorating the 75 anniversary of the Nakba on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, in the Dirksen Building in Washington, D.C. REP. RASHIDA TLAIB VIA TWITTER
Sanders Hosts Event Commemorating Israel’s Nakba After McCarthy Kicked It Out
“Let the headlines read ‘McCarthy tries to erase Palestine but fails,’” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
By Sharon Zhang
Truthout
May 11, 2023 - On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) swooped in to save an event at the Capitol commemorating the 75th anniversary of what Palestinians know as the Nakba, or catastrophe — the time period during which Zionist militants expelled three-quarters of Palestinians from their homes to establish the state of Israel — after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) attempted to cancel the event.
The event, hosted by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), was slated to feature Palestinian survivors of the Nakba while highlighting Israel’s continued oppression of Palestinians, and was co-organized by groups like the Institute for Middle East Understanding and Jewish Voice for Peace Action. It was planned to take place in the U.S. House side of the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, D.C.
At the last minute, however, the event got kicked out of the space by McCarthy. Rather than allowing a member of Congress to recognize the cruelty of Israeli apartheid, McCarthy invoked his power as speaker to instead host his own event “to honor the 75th anniversary of the US-Israel relationship,” as he announced on Twitter — completely erasing Palestinians from the equation.
“Speaker McCarthy wants to rewrite history and erase the existence and truth of the Palestinian people,” Tlaib responded in a statement. “We cannot allow the same people who want to ban books and erase history simply because they’re uncomfortable with the truth to silence Palestinian voices.”
Soon after, Sanders swooped in to rescue the event, instead hosting the speakers in the Senate side of the building in the room where the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, of which Sanders is chair, meets. The event wasn’t able to be filmed, as planned, but it went on, with speakers noting the irony of the scuffle.
“It’s ironic we’ve been displaced at our Nakba event,” said Jumana Musa, daughter of Abed Musa, whose family was forced to flee Palestine during the Nakba. “They thought they could bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
Tlaib presented a resolution calling on Congress to recognize the Nakba and the rights of Palestinians that she introduced on Wednesday to Abed Musa. ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Podcast of the Week: How to Save a Country
Is America Two Nations?
Division—racial, cultural, economic, and electoral—has dominated our politics from the very beginning.
It’s not uncommon for political pundits to muse on the differences between red and blue America. But political analyst Michael Podhorzer argues that the United States has always been more like two nations tenuously united under the Constitution. These “red and blue nations,” as he calls them, are divided by geography, by political economy, and by different views toward religion and even democracy itself.
On this episode of How to Save a Country, co-hosts Michael Tomasky and Felicia Wong discuss with Mike the historical origins of this split, the ramifications for electoral strategy, and the role the Supreme Court has played in hardening these divisions.
“They don’t actually hear cases anymore,” Mike says. “They look for opportunities to legislate, and in fact, I think that’s really the frame we need to think about the court now: It’s the only functioning legislative body in the country.”
Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.
Mike Podhorzer [clip]: There’s so many different reasons why these two nations have just such fundamentally different histories and different economic foundations that it just keeps moving into this division.
Felicia Wong: That’s Mike Podhorzer. He’s our guest this week, and he has us thinking …
Michael Tomasky: What if America really is two different countries acting like one?
Felicia: What do these two nations, red and blue, look like?
Michael: And how does the Supreme Court specifically enable this division?
Felicia: Can labor unions, where people work together, can unions bring our whole country together?
Felicia: I’m Felicia Wong, president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute.
Michael: And I’m Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic.
Felicia: And this is How to Save a Country, our podcast about the ideas and the people behind a progressive vision for America.
Felicia: So Michael, last episode, Gary Gerstle really encouraged us to think about our history including this idea of a political order, whether or not norms and policy positions can change, and then what makes them really sticky. Today’s conversation with Mike Podhorzer is, in a way, a continuation of that. Mike really has us think about political orders. Red orders and blue orders is how he talks about them. He just connects our history to the present in very political and electoral ways.
Michael: Yeah. And it’s interesting because most people, even somewhat careful observers of politics, think that these divisions started in the 1990s.
Felicia: Or maybe the ’80s, but yeah, recently.
Michael: Well, the truth is they started in the nineties—the 1790s.
Felicia: 1790s, maybe 1690s. If it’s really true that our differences are so intense that we might as well be two separate countries, which is Mike’s basic proposition here, that is a pretty pessimistic thing to say. It feels like maybe we shouldn’t be talking about America’s problems in such stark terms, especially on this show, Michael. I mean, we call our show How to Save a Country, so is this too much to say that we’re that divided?
Michael: Well, I don’t know. Let’s just acknowledge reality. I think that virtually every day. I ask myself that virtually every day. Our goal is to save the country, but you have to acknowledge certain realities along the way. No problem with that.
Felicia: Yeah, and maybe even like they say in therapy, right? Like if you really acknowledge the truth, then you can make progress in solving the problem.
Michael: There you go. Let’s look at it that way.
Felicia: Mike is another one of those not-so-secret weapons in the progressive movement. He was for years the political director at the AFL-CIO, which is the biggest and most powerful federation of labor unions in the United States.
Michael: Mike’s a keen political analyst. He just hoovers up data and in the early days after Donald Trump’s election, he started bringing pollsters and political strategists together to try to figure out what in the heck was going on in America. And that effort has now become a mainstay of our politics. I’m one of the small army of people who await his weekly emails on Sunday evening that help us make sense of things. So this is why we wanted to bring Mike, who’s now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress onto the show to find out what he knows about where this country has been and is headed. Welcome to the show, Mike Podhorzer.
Mike Podhorzer: Great to be here.
Felicia: Here’s where I want to start. You’ve talked a lot about a Red Nation and a Blue Nation, and I think by that you mean something different than red states and blue states. So here’s a quote from you, “When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people … But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.” What did you mean by all of that?
Mike: What I mean is that the current discussion about the crisis in America fails in my mind because it looks at, mostly, public opinion polls, which gives the illusion that there are just a lot of people out there and what they think. But this country was founded with one nation, which was born with slavery and with a very theocratic, illiberal bent, and another that was committed to a more commercial, innovative, secular culture. And because the treaty, which we call the Constitution, was built in many ways for those two nations to retain the integrity of those beliefs, we have not gotten past that over 250 years. There are still obvious differences between the cultures and societies and the way people live in those two nations.
Felicia: So if you drew us a map of Red Nation and Blue Nation what would that look like?
Mike: Red Nation begins with a nucleus of the original Southern states, the states that seceded in 1860. And it first grew by absorbing border states like Kentucky and Tennessee that did not secede, but after the Civil War, adopted Jim Crow constitutions. And then more recently, as smaller Western states were settled into that spirit, that rounds out the Red Nation and it constitutes, where about half of Americans live right now, but it has a significantly smaller portion of GDP than Blue Nation. Blue Nation is essentially the liberal nation outside of that area. It’s many of the states that fought in the union. There’s been a kind of nucleus, which people think of as New England, and maybe the West Coast. And it does not include places like Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania, where the question of whether a liberal approach, or like a more theocratic approach is still constantly being fought.
Felicia: So let’s pause here briefly to give a quick overview of how Mike actually thinks about purple states and their role.
Michael: Yeah, I think he’s saying that obviously there’s swing states, but a little bit more than that, that they determine which set of values, blue values or red values, or which nation, Blue Nation or Red Nation, is dominant for any period of time.
Felicia: Yes, exactly.
Mike: And for most of the country’s history, each of those nations quickly organized themselves as regional parties. It’s really only in a very short period of time during the actual aggressive enforcement of the Voting Rights Act that we started to see that come.
Felicia: Voting Rights Act, to remind us again, 1965?
Mike: Sixty-five. Right. And so in that immediate period after that, we began to see more convergence in the country. But then everything started going back to where it had been. There are so many different reasons why these two nations have just such fundamentally different histories and different economic foundations, that it just keeps moving into this division.
Michael: Mike, let me ask you about the history, because I think this is something our listeners would be really interested in learning more about. You trace this back to the beginning of the Republic. Is this about Federalists versus Democratic Republicans? Those were our first original two political parties. The Federalists, the Hamiltonians, the city slickers, the coastal elites, if you will, and the Democratic Republicans, the Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. Does that map onto today’s divide, or not quite exactly?
Mike: Very close. And I think that there’s a way in which when we try to think about that history, we get unfortunately locked in a binary that you just described, between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans. I think a more accurate way of talking about it is that what was then the Confederacy has been an enduring, unified, geographic nation within a nation from the beginning only interrupted by the Civil War and begun to be interrupted by the dismantling of Jim Crow in the middle of the twentieth century. But other than that, it has been an intentional nation within the nation.
Michael: It’s been, you say, an authoritarian state within a state, a one-party state within a state, with the exception of that transition period in the mid to late twentieth century.
Mike: Right. Really though where it reconsolidates in the same kind of iron grip way is beginning with the 2010 election where this built-in impulse to separate by region was supercharged by a trifecta of the backlash against the Obama election and the way the Republican establishment reacted to it, the great recession, and the decisions to completely rewrite the rules of elections that the Supreme Court undertook at that point.
Felicia: So, Mike, there are a lot of other things going on in our politics in 2010, but I do want to call out specifically that it was Barack Obama’s Blackness, the reaction to our nation’s first Black president. That is a lot of what drove the Tea Party and the Republican wave that year. Just worth noting, but I want to take us now actually to the question of the political economies of these two nations. I think you see Red Nation and Blue Nation as fundamentally different not just culturally but also economically,
Mike: That’s a really important thing because of our obsession with thinking that the only thing dividing this country is a set of social issues. Kept behind the curtains are all the major economic interests that actually have a huge impact on our politics. And in that way, they’re just fundamentally different. The Red Nation has always been the foundation of extracted industries, the oil industry, obviously at the beginning, cotton—
Felicia: And enslavement. Right, so it was both.
Mike: Yeah, whereas the Blue Nation has tech and communications and finance. I’m not saying all of those are great things, and obviously they had a lot to do with the Democrats’ turn toward neoliberalism. But it’s a fundamentally different outlook that is more global in its aperture and that values education and those kinds of industries that are really the hub of innovation in the economy. Especially since 2010, the Blue Nation has used that wholehearted endorsement of innovation and global and all that to have grown much faster than the Red Nation where rolling back rights, attacking business, all of those things have retarded growth in those states.
Felicia: Well, sure, Mike. It’s important to point out that the economics in Red Nation really causes suffering for people who live there in terms of income and all kinds of indicators of health and well-being. Then again, there are places in Red Nation, cities in these states, where you do see more innovative economics driven by research universities and hospitals and these anchor institutions. At the same time, the conservative grip on the politics of these places more broadly is pretty tight. So what makes it possible for conservatives to keep winning in Red Nation when their policies aren’t delivering on quality of life?
Mike: Sure. One of the things that also happened after 2010 is that the approach that the Fed took toward creating liquidity really caused a boom in urban areas. And one of the consequences of that was that suddenly Atlanta, and Houston, Dallas, began to look more like what we’re sort of loosely calling blue. But the problem has been that the nature of elections, and the nitty-gritty of it, gives the white Christian nationalist base in those states still enough power to hold control of the region. The Republican primaries in those states, in almost all of them, at least 45 percent of the people voting are white evangelicals. As a group, that is obviously far to the right of the nation and has the commitments that we see reflected in Red nation, that is a pretty tight grip. Because with gerrymandering, those Republican primaries determine who’s going to represent the district. So you can see states like Georgia, which have become competitive when every vote in the state counts equally, are completely unavailable for the thought of reform in state policies, because the state legislatures are a gerrymandered huge majority. And that, at least for the next 10 years, is the problem in that region.
Michael: Well, it’s interesting that you raised that these days it’s not really a question of states. It is to some extent, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. You have all kinds of super right-wing congressional districts in the north, not in New England, but in New York, in Michigan. Michigan’s history of legislative cheating is perhaps the most racist in the country, maybe more than Mississippi and Alabama. So you have blue dots as we know, Birmingham, Alabama is a blue dot, Gainesville, Florida is a blue dot. The economies of these places are different. The economies of cities and university towns are better than the economies of small towns in rural areas. But the politics are really different. So it’s not like when we had the Civil War in 1861, it was pretty clear the line was the Mason-Dixon line. If we tried to have a civil war today, we wouldn’t know how to divide.
Mike: Well, I think that the thing that complicates that complication—
Michael: Yeah?
Mike: —is that it was also true during the Civil War that there were many people in the Confederacy who were not part of the plantation class that were not terribly thrilled about a civil war.
Michael: Well, yeah, most of them, that’s true.
Mike: Within every society, people have differences of opinions. The reason that I keep coming back to states is that those are the fundamental sovereign units of our country, basically still. That blue in Birmingham really has very little power in our constitutional system. The whole state of Alabama has almost all of the say on it. There’s a state supreme court, a state legislature, all of those things.
Felicia: Right. One of the things that you describe, Mike, in much of your writing is the effort over time for a larger nation, a more expansive rights-focused nation, a more generous nation to persuade the red or whatever you want to call it. In a way, you can think of that as really the struggle our nation has been going through for more than 300 years. That being said, I think that one question is, OK, well where is the court system going to be in this struggle between red and blue or rights expansion versus rights contraction? How do you think the court is playing a role in today’s red and blue politics? ...Read More
|
|
New Journals and Books for Radical Education... |
|
From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University
Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education
Paperback USD 17.00
This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.
|
|
The Man Who Changed Colors
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
When a dockworker falls to his death under strange circumstances, investigative journalist David Gomes is on the case. His dogged pursuit of the truth puts his life in danger and upends the scrappy Cape Cod newspaper he works for.
Spend a season on the Cape with this gripping, provocative tale that delves into the
complicated relationships between Cape Verdean Americans and African Americans, Portuguese fascist gangs, and abusive shipyard working conditions. From the author of The Man Who Fell From The Sky.
“Bill Fletcher is a truth seeker and a truth teller – even when he’s writing fiction. Not unlike Bill, his character David Gomes is willing to put his life and career in peril to expose the truth. A thrilling read!” − Tavis Smiley, Broadcaster & NY TIMES Bestselling Author
|
|
Revolutionary Youth and the
New Working Class
The Praxis Papers,
the Port authority Statement, the RYM Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS
Edited by Carl Davidson
A Collection of 12 essays featuring some of the most creative and controversial work of
the U.S. New Left
of the late 1960s.
Most items are difficult to find, and in one important case, The Port Authority Statement, written in 1967 to replace the Port Huron Statement, appears here for the first time. Important for today's radical youth.
|
|
NOT TO BE MISSED: Short Links To Longer Reads... |
|
Not "Migrants." Refugees.
What caused the crisis at the border and in our cities?
By Fred Klonsky
fredklonsky.substack.com/
MAY 12, 2023 - In 1948 the great Woody Guthrie wrote the song Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).
The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"
My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters they working the old church,
They rode the big truck still laydown and died
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"
Woody wrote the song following a plane crash in California which killed 28 Mexican farmworkers who were being deplorted. The newspapers never printed their names, only describing them as deportees.
As I watched the hysterical reporting on the news last night about the thousands of people on our southern border and the cynical political moves by Florida’s Governor DeSantis an Texas Governor Abbott to bus thousands of refugees to New York and Chicago, Woody’s song came to mind.
“They're not migrants,” I said to nobody. “They’re refugees.”
The word migrant doesn’t carry the emotional weight of the word refugee.
They not just trying to move somewhere. They’re trying to escape something.
And that something are conditions that the a long line of U.S. administrations have created.
Chicago congressman Chuy Garcia spoke to this yesterday.
The driving factors that have led to the surge include our foreign policy in the region, including Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela. Second, I think because of Covid and the ravaging of the economies in those countries that we’re seeing new migrants. And there are climate refugees. Those are folks being displaced from their countries because they can’t make a living and it’s spreading violence in those communities.”
“And, of course, our immigration laws have made legal pathways more scarce for people coming here, and Congress’ inability to enact immigration reform has sent a clear message that the only way to get here is through unauthorized means.”
What Chuy wouldn’t say is that Democrat Joe Biden has continued many of the policies of previous administrations, policies that have ravaged the economies of the countries where these refugees came from. ...Read More
|
|
The Wiyot Tribe Is Getting Its Land Back and Making California More Affordable
Using the first community land trust developed under tribal law in the United States, the group is turning empty buildings in the coastal city of Eureka into transitional housing.
Text by Kalen Goodluck
Photos by Kalen Goodluck
From Dwell.com
In early February, a light rain sprinkles across the windshield of Michelle Vassel’s forest green Prius, an official vehicle of the Wiyot Tribe. She’s driving south along the CA-255 bridge toward Eureka, a coastal city in Northern California, passing Tuluwat Island. Ted Hernandez, chair of the Wiyot Tribe, sits in the passenger seat, observing the island—the sacred cultural center of the tribe’s cosmological universe. He and Vassel, the tribal administrator, are surveying the ancestral lands the tribe has recovered in the last 20 years.
In the evenings, Vassel says, some unhoused people walk north across the two-lane bridge to make camp or find shelter on one of the islands in the middle of the bay or farther north in Samoa, a forested peninsula across the waters. They then walk back to Eureka the next day for social services.
On the coast north of San Francisco around Eureka, California, the Wiyot Tribe has spent decades reclaiming its ancestral lands.
On the coast north of San Francisco around Eureka, California, the Wiyot Tribe has spent decades reclaiming its ancestral lands.
Tuluwat Island sits in what is now Humboldt Bay. Many Wiyot people lived on the island until 1860. That year, a group of white settlers interrupted the Wiyot Tribe’s World Renewal Ceremony on the island, killing scores of Wiyot people, mostly women, children, and elders—an act so vicious, it earned the city the nickname Murderville by newspapers in San Francisco and New York. Afterward, the bay was full of blood, Vassel says. For more than 150 years, the island remained out of Wiyot hands until the tribe began purchasing it piece by piece in 1999. Now, the tribe owns most of the island and has created a historic connection with the people of Eureka.
"This has been an intergenerational movement to heal the island, to heal our people, to heal our community. Today we make history together," Hernandez said at a news conference among Eureka’s city leaders the day the last land was returned in 2019. "We changed their story."
"I like to think I just happened to be one of the lucky ones that was alive and here when that happened," says Vassel. "But, you know, work had been done for generations getting to that point."
While returning land to tribes is a major achievement, it isn’t a silver bullet solution to the many problems facing the Wiyot and other tribes across the country. Even when land is returned, many Native people still can’t afford to live close by, something especially true in California, where in January the overall median home price exceeded $751,000, according to the California Association of Realtors. ...Read More
|
|
'Women's Bill Of Rights' Created By Secretive Group That Opposes Women's Rights
By Rebecca Crosby And Tesnim Zekeria
https://popular.info/
MAY 10, 2023 - On April 27, the Republican-controlled Kansas legislature overrode Governor Laura Kelly’s (D) veto to pass a law that legally defines an individual’s sex as “an individual’s sex at birth, either male or female.” The law, referred to as a “Women’s Bill of Rights,” defines a female as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova.”
The new law in Kansas is the most high-profile success of a well-financed and systematic campaign to establish anti-trans policies across the country. It is being coordinated by a secretive group that has consistently opposed policies that protect and expand women's rights.
The law states that “with respect to biological sex, separate accommodations are not inherently unequal” and that “distinctions between the sexes [are to] be considered substantially related to… protecting the health, safety, and privacy of individuals” in certain spaces. The spaces include restrooms, domestic violence centers, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, and athletic facilities.
The new law attempts to erase transgender individuals by excluding them from spaces deemed as “women only.” “The Kansas bill would certainly be among the most restrictive ones that we’ve seen in the country — one of the most expansive, one of the most extreme and really just one of the most mean spirited and hurtful,” ACLU of Kansas Executive Director Micah Kubic said, according to Politico.
The original bill, SB 180, was based on model legislation written by the Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) in collaboration with the Independent Women’s Law Center and Women's Liberation Front. The IWV is the action arm of the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a dark money group that claims to fight to “expand women’s options and opportunities.”
The IWF website states that the group is an “educational” non-profit “dedicated to developing and advancing policies that aren’t just well intended, but actually enhance freedom, opportunities, and well-being.” But while the group publicly claims to be non-partisan, it has extensive right-wing ties. In 2016, CEO of IWV and Chairman of IWF Heather R. Higgins admitted in a speech, “Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know know that you’re actually conservatives puts us in a unique position.”
In March 2022, the IWV introduced the model legislation for a “women’s bill of rights” and called for legislation to “protect biological sex as a distinct legal category,” stating that the “basic definition” of “woman” has “come under fire in recent years by activists who dispute the biological basis of womanhood.” According to the IWF website, the “women’s bill of rights” was introduced to “counter transgender ideology.”
|
|
From the CCDS Socialist Education Project... |
|
|
A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project & Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity orders from carld717@gmail.com), or order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
|
|
|
|
Taking Down
White Supremacy
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
|
|
|
|
Against Half-Solidarity and False Pacifism
Statement of the Russian Socialist Movement on May Day
By Russian Socialist Movement (RSD)
via LINKS International
May 1, 2023 - May Day is not only International Workers’ Day but also a day of solidarity with the oppressed peoples and civil disobedience against war.
For example, one can remember the 1971 May Day protests against US imperialist aggression in Vietnam in Washington. During that time, the antiwar movement’s stance was clear: halt the war, complete the withdrawal of American troops, and support the right of the Vietnamese people to self-determination.
Nowadays the Left is also leaning toward pacifism but its present iteration is much more ambivalent. While it still highlights issues of American imperialism, the prevention of nuclear war, and condemns militarization and war as means of resolving conflicts, it faces challenges in precisely identifying the aggressor and exhibits a willingness to tolerate Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory and the continued presence of Russian troops there. Thus this version of pacifism is deprived of real solidarity with the oppressed peoples.
Campism of the Left, an ideological predisposition implying that the Left must endorse or at least refrain from criticism of the regimes which resist the hegemony of the West, usually hinders the support of Ukraine. This approach overlooks other imperialisms and ignores the opinion of the activists from the global periphery struggling against their ‘antiimperialist’ dictators.
Another obstacle to solidarity with Ukraine is the antimilitarist perspective of the Western Left which makes morally problematic any form of alignment with military preparations of one’s government or with the rhetoric of the ‘defense of democracy’ which legitimized ‘humanitarian interventions’ in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
We would like to highlight that such pacifism is false for several reasons. First, it is armed with old dogmas which are not reconsidered in light of current circumstances. Rejecting ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’, the Left devalues the concepts and principles of the Left movement, turning them into mere abstractions. “Anti-imperialism” is reduced to struggle with American imperialism and NATO expansion whereas pacifism is transformed from the instrument of struggle against the aggressor into the instrument of the appeasement of the aggressor. “False” pacifism promotes neutrality or limited support for Ukraine.
However, we are convinced that the application of the same critical standards the Left apply to capitalist societies of the Global North means full-blown support of Ukraine since Russia is an imperialist aggressor which has already annexed part of the Ukrainian territory, killed more than 120 000 people and displaced millions of Ukrainian peoples whereas Ukraine is fighting a war of national liberation.
Moreover, it is essential to recognize that Putin’s regime does not serve as a bulwark against imperialism. It represents a version of reactionary authoritarian capitalism. Putin’s regime has waged war with Ukraine in order to survive as a class and in order to repartition the zones of influence. Therefore, the lack of solidarity with the oppressed and the lack of condemnation of the oppressor makes internationalism meaningless.
Second, ‘false pacifism’ fails to propose a viable solution to end the war. Its demand for peace at any cost, including the recognition of the current status quo, disregards the specific circumstances at hand. ‘False pacifism’ does not take into account that Ukraine requires liberation instead of ‘peace.’ Peace on any conditions will not only mean a deal with the aggressor but also will be just an armistice since Putin’s regime has entered such a stage where it cannot stop waging wars without the risk of losing power.
Both Ukrainian and Russian peoples need military defeat of Putin’s regime. Only this opens the prospect of change for both of them and the potential promotion of the socialist agenda. Putin’s regime hinders not only the struggle of the oppressed at home but also in the neighboring countries. As far as Russia is concerned, we have already emphasized that the level of inequality in Russia has risen significantly during the 20 years of Putin’s leadership. Putin is not only an enemy of all forms of democracy but also an enemy of the working class. Popular participation in politics and voluntary associations is treated with suspicion in Russia. Putin is essentially an anti-Communist and an enemy of everything the left fought for in the twentieth century and is fighting for in the twenty-first. Therefore, without the collapse of Putin’s repressive dictatorship, it is hardly realistic to expect any positive changes in the working class’s condition in Russia and Ukraine, and only military defeat can facilitate this collapse.
Furthermore, from a global perspective allowing Putin’s regime to get away with the war sets another dangerous precedent in international relations. It signals other countries with nuclear power or powerful armies that the wars of annexations are tolerated and that the international community will do nothing to stop the aggressor. The Nagorno-Karabakh crisis is now described in the irredentist language by Azerbaijan, which has already occupied some Armenian territories Turkish air strikes in Iraq and Syria in 2022-2023 and Israel air raids on Gaza and Lebanon in 2023 have not received enough international attention as well. Putins’s worldview according to which the strong have a right to beat the weak has to be dealt a severe blow in Ukraine otherwise irredentist bloody wars will be legalized all over the world. Thus the victory of Ukraine in the war is needed to prevent the normalization of the bloodbath in the world.
Finally, ‘false pacifism’ disguised under Left slogans reveals a petty-bourgeois nature characterized by egocentrism. ‘False pacifism’ is egocentric because it is reduced to the struggle with one’s national government. Opposition to the national political mainstream is prioritized over solidarity with the Ukrainian people. ‘False pacifism’ is driven by self-interest as it is primarily concerned with the potential repercussions for the working class in Western countries and the spread of the war to the West itself as a result of more active support of Ukraine. In other words, ‘false pacifism’ boils down to distance from the war.
What an interesting transformation: 50 years ago the Left movement criticized Western consumerist society for their ignorance of the wars in the Global South and valorization of material comfort, now the Left themselves is trying to approach the war from a safe distance. ‘False pacifism’ avoids listening to the demands of the Ukrainian socialists and Russian socialists who insist not only moral or humanitarian support of Ukraine but also a rejection of any compromises with Putin’s regime, recognition of the right of Ukraine to resist and approval of further arms transfers to Ukraine.
The lack of desire of the Left to rub shoulders with their political mainstream is understandable. However, neutrality kills the prospects of the Left more than any form of participation in the support of Ukraine. It is high time the Left promoted their agenda which would enable them to preserve their political subjectivity. Such an agenda may include the following demands:
1. Increased arms transfers to Ukraine which will enable it to return its annexed territories.
2. Complete withdrawal of the Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine.
3. Redistribution of the burden of militarization. It is the government and the companies who conducted and still conduct business with Russia thereby indirectly supporting its authoritarian regime, should bear the costs of the war, not the working class.
4. Cancellation of Ukraine’s debt.
5. Easing of immigration processes which will allow hosting more displaced Ukrainians and Russians who are fleeing from repressions and mobilizations. As regards Russians, we would like to repeat that engaging in political activities while in prison or on the front lines is extremely challenging.
6. Introducing the sanctions which will target Putin’s elite particularly whose financial assets were hardly been affected by previous sanctions.
7. Abolition of secret diplomacy and conduct of all negotiations quite openly in full view of the whole people.
It is imperative for the Left to shift their solidarity away from the ruling classes of the countries which imagined themselves oppressed and humiliated to people and societies fighting against oppression. To foster such solidarity, the Left has to develop the capacity to decentralize their view and empathy. From this perspective, it is impossible not to solidarize with the people of Ukraine.
The oppressed, not only in Ukraine and Russia but worldwide, require horizontal solidarity and empathy rather than rigid geopolitical thinking and campism. Only then can the workers’ movement triumph and pave the way for peace and socialism!
May 1, 2023
Russian Socialist Movement
• The Russian Socialist movement was founded in March 2011 by two organizations, the Socialist Movement Vperiod (“Forward”), Russian section of the Fourth International, and Socialist Resistance. It is part of the Left Front, an alliance formed during the protests against the falsification of the elections in 2011 and 2012. ...Read More
|
|
CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
Remember Us for Gift Giving and Study Groups
We are a small publisher of books with big ideas. We specialize in works that show us how a better world is possible and needed. Click Gramsci below for our list.
|
|
History Lesson of the Week:
The Brief but Shining Life of Paul Laurence Dunbar,
a Poet Who Gave Dignity to the Black Experience
|
|
A 1903 photograph of Paul Laurence Dunbar Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
A prolific writer, he inspired such luminaries as Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes
By Minnita Daniel-Cox,
The Conversation
March 6, 2023 - Paul Laurence Dunbar was only 33 years old when he died in 1906.
In his short yet prolific life, Dunbar used folk dialect to give voice and dignity to the experiences of Black Americans at the turn of the 20th century. He was one of the first Black Americans to make a living as a writer and was seminal in the start of the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance.
Dunbar also wrote one of the most iconic phrases in Black literature—“I know why the caged bird sings”—in his poem “Sympathy.” The poem’s last stanza reads:
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
Published in 1899, “Sympathy” inspired acclaimed Black writer and activist Maya Angelou to use Dunbar’s line as the title of her seminal 1969 autobiography.
Today, however, Dunbar’s artistic legacy is often overlooked, despite the fact that his work influenced many other great African American literary giants, including Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Walker.
In a very real sense, Dunbar is your favorite poet’s favorite poet.
A blooming life of writing
Born on June 27, 1872, to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky, Dunbar was raised by his mother in Dayton, Ohio.
While there, Dunbar attended the integrated Dayton Central High School. An exceptional writer, he was the only Black student in his class. He served as editor-in-chief of the high school newspaper, as well as a member of the literary and drama clubs and debating society.
Dunbar also became friends with a white classmate who, with his brother Wilbur, would later invent the airplane—Orville Wright.
The two knew each other well. The Wright brothers, who owned a printing press, were the first to publish Dunbar’s writings, including the newspaper he started and edited in 1890. The Dayton Tattler was the first Black newspaper in that city.
After high school, Dunbar’s and Wright’s lives took different turns.
Unable to find consistent pay for his writing, Dunbar worked a variety of jobs, including as a janitor in one downtown Dayton office building and as an elevator operator in another. Not one to miss a business opportunity, the 20-year-old sold his first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, to passengers he met on the elevator.
Dunbar found another job after moving to Washington, D.C., where he stacked shelves at the Library of Congress. According to his wife, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, an accomplished writer in her own right, it was there that her husband began to think about the image of a caged bird.
“The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one,” Alice wrote in 1914. “The dry dust of the dry books … rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beats its wings against its cage.”
Dunbar’s first break came when he was invited to recite his poems at the 1893 World’s Fair, where he met the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Impressed, Douglass gave Dunbar a job as a clerk, calling him the “the most promising young colored man in America.”
Dunbar’s second break came three years later. On his 24th birthday, he received a glowing review in Harper’s Weekly of his second book of poetry, Majors and Minors, from the prominent Ohio-raised literary critic William Dean Howells.
That review came with a mixed blessing. Howells’ praise of Dunbar’s use of dialect limited the poet’s ability to sell his other styles of writing.
But that same review helped catapult Dunbar to international acclaim. ...Read More
|
|
These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!
Powerful stories, wonderful gifts.
As they stand up, slow down, form unions, leave an abusive relationship or just stir up good trouble, the characters in this multi-generation novel entertain and enlighten, make us laugh and rage, and encourage us to love deeply, that we may continue the fight for justice.
"So much fiction is about escape and fantasy, but these powerful Tales of Struggle will enrich our real and daily lives." ─ Gloria Steinem
“What a wonderful story of class, class struggle and regular people. The story is about struggle and change, but also about joy and humor. Great work! ─ Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of Solidarity Divided
Price: $15.00
|
|
Amazing Worldwide
Internet Radio:
Put your speakers on, rotate, zoom in, pick a station, anywhere in the world, any time, live, native languages and many English stations as well, thousands of them
Copy this link: http://radio.garden/visit/santa-cruz-da-graciosa/MDu6eLeE
|
|
What’s Up with the So-Called ‘News’ on México?
WEEKLY BULLETIN OF THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY PROJECT
from the May 10, 2023 Bulletin
|
|
Jesús Hermosillo, a Los Angeles-based trade union researcher, has been a lifelong observer of social justice politics in the United States and México, the original home of his family. His perceptive writing and research — on full display in this 2021 Current Affairs analysis — have always contested negative mainstream narratives on México. More such analyses will be coming via his new México Solidarity Bulletin “Media Rewind” column that debuts this week.
As an admitted “news junkie” and independent political journalist, how would you rate the coverage of México in the US and other Western media?
I’ve dug into articles about México going back centuries. México has never been well covered. But the coverage has gotten worse. In the early 20th century, the US public could widely recognize the name of the current Mexican president. But the frequency of media coverage — and the range of topics covered — began diminishing in the 1970s. By the 1990s, US media coverage of México was essentially only focusing on drug trafficking and violence, and that’s still true today.
“If it bleeds,” goes the old media saying, “it leads.” Does that explain why coverage on México focuses on violence and crime?
That’s part of the reason. Most all media outlets in both México and the US remain privately owned, largely in the hands of oligarchs. The news has become more and more profit-driven, more sensationalistic, less concerned about quality.
The internet has magnified that trend. Now it’s all about the clicks. As a result, real investigative journalism has become rare.
Media owners don’t want to pay for in-depth research or to follow up on important events, because just posting some “clickbait” online — some dramatic or shocking headline that grabs clicks — can make them big profits. Ciudad Juarez/Associated Press
Newspaper staffs have shrunk over recent decades, and foreign bureaus have been particularly decimated. Overseas slots used to be prestigious jobs reserved for seasoned journalists. Now the few foreign bureau assignments left go to younger — less costly — reporters who aren’t expected to do as much. In a lot of US newspaper coverage of México, I mainly see a regurgitation of what US reporters read in the Mexican media. If you want to know what the Mexican media is saying, insiders say, just read the Washington Post!
What about progressive media sources?
Progressive media, for the most part, aren’t providing alternative analyses. México can be confusing. Progressives have a good idea of who’s who in countries like El Salvador or Honduras, where US interference has been clear, or in countries where right-wing governments are killing dissenters. But México had leftist leaders in the early 20th century, especially in the 1930s. After that, the ruling PRI party became expert in paying lip service to revolutionary ideals. The PRI would make a show of defying US policy by supporting Cuba, for instance. But domestically the oligarchs ruled and the people suffered.
US progressives can also get confused because leftists in other countries don’t sound like the US left. Former Bolivian President Evo Morales once said, for instance, that “eating chicken can turn you into a homosexual.” Does that mean he’s not left and should not be supported? AMLO doesn’t come off as a feminist champion. Does that mean he’s not left — even though he’s improving the lives of the common people and pursuing the oligarchs to pay back what they’ve stolen?
Cultural and economic issues all rate as important, but many US progressives tend to prioritize the cultural over the economic in their assessment of who qualifies as “left.” ...Read More
|
|
|
Our Amazing Resource for Radical Education
From the settlers to the present, and how its consciousness is conflicted. Prepared by Carl Davidson and Rebecca Tarlau,
with some help from the DSA Rust Belt group.
|
There are hundreds of video courses here, along with study guides, downloadable books and links to hundreds of other resources for study groups or individuals.
Nearly 10,000 people have signed on to the OUL for daily update, and more than 150,000 have visited us at least once.
Karl Marx's ideas are a common touchstone for many people working for change. His historical materialism, his many contributions to political economy and class analysis, all continue to serve his core values--the self-emancipation of the working class and a vision of a classless society. There are naturally many trends in Marxism that have developed over the years, and new ones are on the rise today. All of them and others who want to see this project succeed are welcome here.
|
|
|
|
Video for Learning: 'It's not the odds, it's the stakes. What journalists should cover about campaigns.' The 11th Hour With Stephanie Ruhle's Trump CNN Takedown -- 21 min
|
|
Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical' |
This week's topic:
Click the picture to access the blog.
|
|
Tune of the Week: Willie Nelson - 'Help Me Make It Through the Night' 4 minutes
|
|
Book Review: Structure and Solidarity
Lasting labor victories depend on coordinating diverse strategies and building the relationships to sustain them.
By Leo Casey
Dissent
Spring 2023
Labor Power and Strategy
by John Womack Jr., ed. by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek
PM Press, 2023, 208 pp.
Two strikes serve as bookends for the heyday of the twentieth-century American labor movement: the 1936–37 sit-down strike of the fledgling United Auto Workers (UAW) against what was then the nation’s largest corporation, General Motors, and the 1981 strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) against the Federal Aviation Administration, a government agency.
The successful UAW strike led not only to the unionization of General Motors; it opened the door to the unionization of basic industry across the U.S. economy, from auto, steel, and textiles to important components of transportation, food production, and communications. The PATCO strike, broken by President Ronald Reagan, led not only to the demise of that union; it marked the start of a period during which industrial unions were decimated and strikes in the United States dwindled to a mere handful.
In the half-century between those two strikes, organized labor in the United States reached its peak strength, both economically and politically. In the mid-1950s, one in three American workers were members of a union, and at the end of the 1970s, union membership, swelled by an influx of public-sector workers, hit its highest point in terms of absolute numbers. Unions provided much of the political muscle behind the social democratic programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. Not coincidentally, these decades of labor movement potency were the period that economists call the “Great Leveling,” in which wealth disparities in the United States were brought down to their lowest point since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Today, after four decades of decline in union power that followed the PATCO strike, a mere one in ten American workers are union members. And income inequality in the United States is, according to Thomas Piketty’s calculations, “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world.”
The Source of Labor Power
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.” The present state of the American labor movement is firmly anchored in its history, so vividly captured in the divergent outcomes of these two strikes. Today, every significant proposal for the revitalization of the labor movement draws upon some understanding of what went wrong and how it might be fixed. One such framework is found in Labor Power and Strategy, a book crafted as a dialogue on the strategic direction of the American labor movement.
In the first half of Labor Power and Strategy, two veteran labor organizers and strategists, Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek, interview John Womack Jr., a distinguished Harvard professor emeritus of history known for his studies of the Mexican Revolution. The interview takes up a theory of labor power Womack developed in an unpublished 2006 book-length manuscript, Working Power over Production, and how that theory might inform labor organizing. In the second half of Labor Power and Strategy, ten noteworthy labor activists and scholars respond to and comment on Womack’s theory and its possible applications. The book concludes with a short rejoinder by Womack.
Olney and Perušek hone in on a fundamental thesis of the 2006 manuscript: the power of working people derives entirely from their structural location in the process of production, as this position determines their ability to disrupt the operations of an employer with strikes and other job actions. This power of disruption is not evenly distributed among workers. Drawing heavily upon the analysis of Harvard labor relations scholar John Dunlop, Womack argues that there are economic “choke points” where a strike can paralyze an entire industry, even the economy as a whole. Workers at these strategic points possess greater power than other workers, simply because the disruptive impact of their strikes and job actions is far-reaching. Womack uses the term “technical power” to characterize the leverage that comes from being able to engage in economic disruption. This term is meant to underline his view that the power of workers is grounded not in their political organization or their cultural networks—the social relations of production—but in their relationship to technology. Labor Power and Strategy often references logistics workers in transportation, distribution, and communications as examples of workers who possess this elevated power.
In order to grow their power, Womack concludes, unions and the left should prioritize the organization of workers at these critical intersections in the economy. Furthermore, they should employ the leverage that comes from their strategic position to advance worker organization and the objectives of labor.
Strategic Thinking, Past and Present
Womack’s theory is not without insights. It is important to think strategically about labor organizing, and to prioritize organizing work and drives that can have the greatest impact. Disruption can create leverage for working people, and disruption on a mass scale, affecting various sectors of the economy, can yield greater leverage. Serious thought should be given on how to amass and deploy leverage won through disruptive strikes and job actions.
None of this is entirely new or foreign to the U.S. labor movement. There have been numerous organizing initiatives over the last two decades—undertaken by Change to Win, the Teamsters, UNITE HERE, the Communications Workers of America, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, and more recently, independent unions—that focused on the logistics sectors: transportation, distribution, and communications. What is missing is not a theory of why it is important to organize Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Walmart, but a critical inventory of these efforts—what successes they have had, where and why they have fallen short, and what could be done to move them forward.
Similarly, the most forward-looking contemporary union organizing employs strategic planning and campaigns rooted in the insights found in Labor Power and Strategy, with an eye to identifying and exploiting the vulnerabilities of recalcitrant employers. Disruptive strikes and job actions are key points of exposure for an employer. But they are by no means the only potential weaknesses that unions can target. Strategic campaigns build community support, employ political leverage, attack brand reputations, generate consumer boycotts, organize shareholder revolts against management, and use social media pressure. The more of these tactics that can be brought to bear, and the more they work in tandem, the greater the pressure on the employer, and the more likely a campaign will end in victory.
One of the responses in Labor Power and Strategy, “Thirty-Two Thousand Hogs and Not a Drop to Drink” by Gene Bruskin, provides a brief account of one successful strategic campaign in this vein, undertaken by the UFCW and workers in the world’s largest slaughterhouse against the meat processing and packing corporation Smithfield. After many years of unsuccessful efforts to win union recognition against an employer that flouted labor law, the UFCW organized a strategic campaign using many of the tactics listed above, which led to an employer agreement to halt its anti-union actions and victory. This example highlights the limitations of Womack’s singular focus on creating leverage through disruptions of production: strategic campaigns are designed to employ many different types of leverage against employers, most of which are external to the production process.
Related flaws in Womack’s theory are revealed when it is applied to labor history, including the two historic strikes that demarcate the period of U.S. labor strength. The 1936–37 sit-down strike targeted factories that were indispensable for the manufacture of cars across General Motors’ operations. Womack discusses at some length the UAW’s organization of the strike—especially its decision to focus on the factory in Flint—as an illustration of how his theory works in practice.
The 1981 PATCO strike targeted a strategic point with a potentially much greater impact: by withholding the labor of air traffic controllers, which was essential for air safety, it could cripple the nation’s entire system of air transportation, both passenger and freight. The shutdown would have disruptive ripple effects throughout the entire economy. It would be hard to imagine a context more aligned with a theory of targeting “choke points.” But the PATCO strike ended in total defeat.
Despite its signal importance in U.S. labor history, Womack doesn’t discuss the PATCO strike in Labor Power and Strategy; in a brief and almost parenthetical passage in the 2006 manuscript, he complains that none of the accounts of the strike had produced “strategic analysis of the industrial or technical reasons for [its] failures.” The idea that researchers studying the strike might have found no “industrial or technical reasons” for its defeat—that the problems lay elsewhere—seems unthinkable.
Yet it is obvious that the PATCO strike was lost politically, with Reagan’s decision to break the strike. PATCO’s major miscalculation was not about its ability to disrupt the air transportation system, but its naïve belief that Reagan wouldn’t respond to such a challenge with an all-out effort to kill the union and its failure to have a plan that addressed such an eventuality. This problem can’t be properly accounted for within the terms of Womack’s theory of labor power.
Seen in this light, the contrast between the 1981 PATCO strike and the 1936–37 UAW strike is instructive. After General Motors obtained court injunctions against the UAW strike, and after the strikers beat back an attempt by police to retake the Flint factory by force, both Michigan Governor Frank Murphy and President Franklin Roosevelt turned down pleas from General Motors to use troops to break the strike. The UAW had timed the strike to coincide with Murphy’s inauguration; this planning and their political influence with the new governor proved pivotal, leaving General Motors with no choice but to recognize and bargain with the UAW.
Politics is not the only factor sidelined by Womack’s singular focus on the technical relations of production. Several Labor Power and Strategy contributors discuss the significance of associational power, a concept borrowed from the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. They interpret it to denote both the ties of solidarity among workers (part of the social relations of production, which Womack disregards) and the connections of workers to the larger community. To put the issue bluntly, being in a structural position of technical power will do nothing for workers if they are not organized to engage in collective action. Womack attempts to address this question of worker agency with an appeal to a structuralist formulation in Marx: workers are “schooled, united, and organized by the mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.” But worker organization and collective action are not a reflexive byproduct of economic processes; it requires self-conscious activity by workers and their unions to build the bonds of trust and common purpose that are at the heart of solidarity.
A Changing Economy and Workforce
Womack’s writing has the virtue of being explicit about the theoretical framework he employs, which is inspired by syndicalism and a Leninist-inflected Marxism. But these ideological currents—with their single-minded focus on industrial production and their instrumentalist view of the state and politics—are particularly ill-suited to recognizing and understanding deep changes in the U.S. economy and political order that have occurred over the last four decades. On the eve of the PATCO strike, manufacturing was at its peak employment in the United States, with some 19 million jobs; today, over one-third of those jobs are gone. In some ways, those numbers understate the extent of this trend: manufacturing has lost roughly 60 percent of its share of total U.S. employment since its 1979 peak. ...Read More
|
|
Photo: A still from 20 Days in Mariupol by Mstyslav Chernov, an official selection of the World Documentary Competition at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka. AP
Film Review: '20 Days in Mariupol'
Among the last journalists left in Ukraine after the invasion, Mystylav Chernov captures a horrifying portrait of destruction.
By Adam Solomons
IdieWire via Portside
The most telling element of “20 Days in Mariupol,” Ukrainian photographer Mystylav Chernov’s pulsating documentary about the first three weeks of a Russian siege that killed tens of thousands of people, is what soldiers make of Chernov and his team. At first, the AP camera crew, the last journalists left in Mariupol, are a nuisance. As apartment buildings are evacuated. Chernov is told to “turn the cameras off” by Ukrainian soldiers he politely refers to as “shy.” He replies: “This is a historical war.”
Two and a half weeks later, Chernov, still photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko receive a personal escort from senior Ukrainian officers. So important are their findings — and ensuring that they live to tell the tale — that the team are ultimately evacuated out of the city in a general’s family car, his daughter draped in a blanket next to Chernov.
The doctors and nurses of Mariupol are less self-conscious. In fact, they get the idea pretty quickly. The last surgeon at Mariupol’s battle-shaken general hospital barks in one interlude between teenagers being thrown onto the operating table: “Show what these motherfuckers are doing to civilians.”
Sundance Film Festival Sets 2024 Key Dates for 40th Anniversary
What happened to Mariupol’s civilians is, of course, the intent of “20 Days in Mariupol,” even if it strays into a journalism-in-action film more than it ought to. The only crime of the port city’s 250,000 people is to live in a place of great strategic importance to Putin’s army. These are supposed to be the people Russia is “liberating” from “Nazi Ukraine” in a “brief” “special military operation.” Needless to say, they do not share Putin’s enthusiasm for a swift reversal of the 1991 referendum in which the majority of Ukrainians in all regions voted to become independent from Russia.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t sporadic voices in Chernov’s film who express pro-Russia sentiment, or even suggest it’s Ukraine’s own Air Force bombing the city. (Even if it wanted to, Ukraine never controlled its airspace for long enough.) One fact of the war unspoken in Chernov’s film are floods of rumor and untrustworthy video which clog up Telegram channels in the country. Some forums are public services, others are public menaces. Each of Ukraine’s major cities has one, often run by local officials; usually it’s the quickest way to find out the air raid sirens are blaring without opening a window. On others, Russian propaganda thrives. “Who wins the information war wins the war,” the Kremlin’s UN ambassador replies ominously when confronted by a British journalist with Chernov’s reporting. Both sides can agree on that.
Chernov says he shot 25 hours of footage in Mariupol, but was only able to share 30 minutes of video with his editors. The satellite phone his team had was enough to keep them informed that he was alive, but you need a pretty good Wi-Fi signal to WeTransfer Gigabytes of MP4s out of a warzone. (Anyway, the Russians saw to the city’s power supply and mobile networks.)
Yet what’s also true is that, had his editors seen all the footage, they wouldn’t have been able to pass on much of it to news organizations. Chernov frequently blurs the most severe injuries, but it’s the puddles of blood, dead animals and lifeless limbs half-buried by rubble that indicate the sheer scale of suffering in Mariupol. His jarringly stoic narration and haunting original music by Jordan Dykstra add to the sense that, in Mariupol, nothing is left. This is not a film about President Zelensky’s Churchillian leadership or the heroism of first responders (though if you look, there is some of that).
If “20 Days in Mariupol” is about anything, it’s how much destruction can be done in such a short time.
To that end, the film centers around the bombing of the city’s maternity hospital on March 9. Images of a mother giving birth as she was stretchered out of the wreckage made front pages and the top of news bulletins globally. The most famous photo is Maloletka’s. Chernov says the stricken mother knew her baby had already died, and begged doctors: “Kill me.” This is one of many bleak stories which offer a window into the flagging resistance of the most oppressed. Chernov shows that the war has, for many Ukrainians, not hardened their resilience. As many as have been killed have been simply overrun.
Still, even the Kremlin rowed back on its initial denial of wrongdoing at the maternity hospital. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov vowed to “ask our military” what had happened, a day after he said “Russian forces do not fire on civilian targets.” Having said that, another Moscow official said the images represented Ukrainian “information terrorism.” Putin’s army plundered the city for another month before respecting humanitarian corridors. The almost three-month battle, in which 25,000 civilians and 10,000 soldiers on both sides are thought to have died, would rage until May, thanks to a dogged resistance by soldiers holed up at the city’s immense, labyrinthine Azovstal steelworks. Chernov, for once wisely, avoids Azovstal. The drama of a documentary about that particular fight might even surpass this one.
That’s not to say this footage is any less than enthralling. At one point a tank turns its turret on the building where Chernov’s team are taking shelter, and you might forget that they make it out alive. It just so happens that the way Chernov holds his camera — usually swinging from his side, but still filming — resembles a cut-scene in a Call of Duty game. “20 Days in Mariupol” doesn’t seek to dramatize the tension of war. But it is pretty fucking dramatic.
Access and shock value aside, the wholesale dismissal of Chernov’s reporting by the Kremlin is the greatest endorsement there is. There are no gaps, grays, or points of debate. Only denials.
|
|
522 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-6637
|
|
|
|
Is the content of this email relevant to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
:focal(700x420:701x421)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/7c/c8/7cc86246-91e3-405b-9a6f-296b6d3f4f8e/paul.jpg)
