June 2023

Fight for High Paying Jobs!

June 26th 9pm ET. 8pm CT, and 6pm PT

4^th Monday, June 26. Our CCDS Socialist Education Project will feature Carl Davidson on a Left approach to fighting for high-paying jobs, restoring highroad manufacturing, and transitioning to clean energy. All these require a new approach to ‘industrial policy’ as a deep structural reform. Our country currently is dominated by a military industrial policy. We will have to combat it with a clean energy and green manufacturing industrial policy. There’s a lot to explore here, so be sure to attend and bring some friends.

Join us!

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0rduuspzMvG9bSduZ6bX1SeNLkwW-IE_zX 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

 fed4mr.org

The following is a remberance from Mildred Williamson

 "Tribute to "Charlene Williamson"

Order your copy of this today!

June 2023

Charlene Mitchell – Our Movement Mother

(from "Tributes to Charlene Mitchell")

By Mildred Williamson

Januuary 7, 2023

In the early 1960s, I was a preteen, and deeply moved by the

nightly television news reports with film coverage of the Civil

Rights Movement, especially the young people whom I could see

fighting off police with their dogs, high power water hoses, yet

singing freedom songs before and after the brutal treatment,

even while jailed. They were fearless! I wondered, how could I

find a way to be a part of this? I didn’t see that type of activity in

Chicago where I grew up, but later as a teenager, I found myself

present when Dr. King came to Chicago. I was fortunate to hear

him speak at my church.

I soon joined other students to establish a new Black Student As-

sociation at my high school. This was hardly comparable to the

heroic struggles I saw on television, but it was a start. We even

had some great teachers who supported us and sponsored our

Black Student Association and our demand to have Before the

Mayflower by Lerone Bennett Jr. as required reading for our US

History class. We actually won that struggle! Baby steps indeed...

Assassination of Fred Hampton

Little did I know what was yet to come. In my senior year of high

school Fred Hampton, chair of the Illinois chapter of the Black

Panther Party, was murdered by police along with Mark Clark on

Chicago’s West Side. That same month, I met Willie J Williamson,

the person who later would become my husband and remains

the love of my life. However, at the time he was in the military

in another state, and I was still striving to finish high school at

home.

And then – I learned about the Angela Davis case and attended a

local rally and concert for her freedom, where my favorite saxo-

phone artist, Gene Ammons performed in solidarity for her re-

lease. Of course, it was electrifying!

I was getting closer, but not quite there in my quest to meet and

learn from seasoned activists in this all-important Movement. I

saw speeches from afar, such as Rev. Jesse Jackson in the early

days of Operation Breadbasket (now Rainbow PUSH Coalition). I

heard Dick Gregory and Dr. King, but no one whom I could easily

spend quality time with to learn more.

So of course, life happens. I finished high school, got a part time

job, and started attending classes at Malcolm X College in Chi-

cago, along with Willie, because by then his military service was

completed. He was living in Chicago, and we decided to get mar-

ried. We were both committed to being a part of this Movement!

Well, through friends who worked in the same factory as Wil-

lie, we met other friends who were activists, and they told us

about a conference that was taking place in Chicago in sup-

port of African Liberation, and help was needed to organize it.

That 1973 conference actually was the founding of the National

Anti-Imperialist Movement in Solidarity with African Liberation

(NAIMSAL), with Oliver Tambo, Henry Winston and Angela Da-

vis as keynote speakers. That was a significant turning point in

both of our lives. We enthusiastically got involved and met so

many people locally and nationally, who would become lifelong

friends, and importantly, mentors and comrades.

Meeting Charlene and her team

We hit the jackpot of our lives that year when we met Charlene

Mitchell, Franklin Alexander, Kendra Alexander, Victoria Missick,

Anne Mitchell, Ishmael Flory, Sylvia Woods and so many others.

These folks took us under their wings and showed us how to or-

ganize, strategize and mobilize people for justice and freedom.

We learned about international struggles, colonialism, Marxism,

the Labor Movement and the meaning of solidarity. We learned a

class analysis of racism and powerful strategies to fight against it.

We learned about race/class/gender intersectionality before the

concept was popularized.

Charlene was a master organizer, strategist, teacher and men-

tor. She taught us the art of persuasion and showed us how to

connect the dots to see how one social justice struggle relates to

another – locally, nationally and globally. She taught us how to

figure out the key tactics of building coalitions, all while standing

on solid principles. She could bring all kinds of people together

for all kinds of social justice struggles. She was a master analyst

of political situations and freely shared her wisdom. She taught us

everything with patience, love and grace.

The impact of Charlene on me was so profound, as it built my

confidence beyond anything I had ever imagined. It turns out

that the skills of political analysis and principled Movement

building are absolutely applicable in all life endeavors. Ev-

erything from navigating the everyday racism and sexism of

school and work situations, child rearing, community struggles

and even issues of self-care and well-being, I could reach back

to lessons learned and recall gems from Charlene that served

as guidance and a way forward.

What a special person to have had in one’s life! I want all who read

this to know that Black women Mothers of this Movement are the

anchors – and Charlene Mitchell was like no other. Love you Char-

lene, forever will!

THE STEADFAST SOCIALIST FROM THE HILL DISTRICT: CARL REDWOOD

BLACK PITTSBURGH·MAY 12, 2023

FEATURED STORY

His decades-long commitment to put the people before profit.

By BlackPittsburgh.com Staff

One of Redwood’s core concerns is the impact of public policy on the decline of Pittsburgh’s Black population. Photo Credit: Nate Guidry Photography

Carl Redwood has committed his life to the pursuit of basic rights for the people in his immediate community and beyond—housing, healthcare, education, and a living wage. These needs, the needs of the people, form the bedrock of his political philosophy. 

Redwood is a longtime Pittsburgh-area economic and social justice organizer who fights for affordable housing in the city, living wage jobs and an end to the displacement of Black Pittsburgh residents. 

He’s also a socialist, an identity he embraces with a monk-like resolve. His is a clear-eyed view of the inescapable pitfalls of capitalism in the United States—a permanent underclass and the precipitous spread of unchecked concentrated poverty. But Redwood still exudes a sense of hope for what our society can be.

“I grew up in Pittsburgh,” Redwood tells us. “My parents both came up here from different parts of Virginia. They met in the Hill District, the neighborhood where I live right now,” he says. 

"There were a couple big housing developments in our community. Most of which are no longer public housing and have been privatized. The residents have been forced out."--Carl Redwood

Redwood was born in 1953 and he has lived in the Hill District (off and on) for most of his life. He currently lives about three blocks from his childhood home. Redwood’s father was a social worker, and his mother was a secretary for the New Pittsburgh Courier. They both instilled in him a strong work ethic and a deep sense of connectedness to the Black community.

Redwood recalls the neighborhood upheaval of his childhood between 1957 and 1961. The Hill was predominantly Black by the mid-1950s. But prior to that, it was a very diverse community. 

“There were lots of different nationalities. Lots of poor people, Jewish people, people from Syria, people from Lebanon, Italians, Germans. There were a whole lot of poor working-class people that lived in the Hill District, and it wasn’t until about the 1950s that the population became majority Black.” 

One of Redwood’s core concerns is the impact of public policy on the decline of Pittsburgh’s Black population. Photo Credit: Nate Guidry Photography

Soon after the neighborhood became majority Black, eminent domain policies radically reshaped it. According to Public Source, “[T]o make way for the Civic Arena in the 1950s, the city seized and cleared homes and businesses in the Lower Hill District.” 

“You could own something down there, but you got to go. They had to pay you, but you couldn’t stay,” says Redwood. 

Redwood sees similar encroachments into the Hill District coming from the east side of the neighborhood via the University of Pittsburgh today. In the middle of our interview, he stops and draws a diagram of the Hill District to better understand his sense of the ways that the neighborhood has been reshaped through history. 

‘The Hill District has a lot of different neighborhoods,” he says. “We call one part the Lower Hill; there’s another section we call Uptown; there’s a section we call Middle Hill and then there’s a section called the Upper Hill or Sugar Top.”

Geography matters. Redwood realizes the premium value of property, especially for those who are challenged with poverty and houselessness. To him, policies like eminent domain and the general drift of gentrification across a variety of Pittsburgh neighborhoods are consequences of capitalism.

“There were a couple big housing developments in our community,” says Redwood. “Most of which are no longer public housing and have been privatized. The residents have been forced out with a promise that they could come back, but they don’t really come back.”

To illustrate his point, Redwood quickly recounts the story of a small public housing community (734 units). All of the residents received vouchers in 2011 in exchange for leaving their homes and a promise that they would be able to return. 

“The plan was to get back to 400 [units], but they’re not even back to 400 yet. And those people are gone, and [their] kids are in school somewhere else,” he says.

According to Census data, the Black population in Pittsburgh has been in decline since the 1980s. Many Black families have been pushed into the post-industrial suburban counties surrounding Pittsburgh. Redwood sees the federal Section 8 program, which was designed to help low-income residents afford housing, among the city’s comprehensive housing problems. 

“Section 8 housing was an attempt to shut down public housing and turn over that revenue and income to private landlords,” he says.

Through Redwood’s eyes, the scope and scale of privatization efforts is expansive (and exhausting). He identifies similar systemic shifts toward private industry in public education and health care.

“Bottom line – I’m a socialist. I’ve been a socialist for a long time,” he says. 

Mr. Redwood marks his movement birthday at some point in 1971, the same year he graduated from high school. He remembers anti-war organizers and activists criticizing and protesting against the Vietnam War. Around that time, he joined a YMCA-led high school intercultural exchange trip to Japan. He taught English at a summer camp there. 

“They were speaking English just as good as we did already,” he says.

 The anti-war movement and Redwood’s experience in Japan forced him to think critically about imperialism. 

By 1972, he became active with the African Liberation Support Committee, which was part of the Black liberation movement in the US. The ALSC “helped to build support for liberation movements in Southern Africa, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.

“Those liberation movements had an ideological basis of socialism of some kind,” he says. 

In 1984, he was Campaign Coordinator for Jesse Jackson’s Presidential Campaign. And through the 1980s and 1990s, he was an organizer in The Garfield Row Houses Tenants Association, The Homestead Unemployed Center, Hill House and Kingsley House. 

More recently, Redwood has been organizing locally with the Hill District Consensus Group, which works to give residents a voice in the decisions that affect their lives, and the Pittsburgh Black Worker Center, an organization that fights for living wage jobs and workers’ rights. 

Last fall, the organization released a study, The State of Black Workers in Pittsburgh, which found that 30% of Black folks in Pittsburgh live in poverty.

Soon after the neighborhood became majority Black, eminent domain policies radically reshaped it. According to Public Source, “[T]o make way for the Civic Arena in the 1950s, the city seized and cleared homes and businesses in the Lower Hill District.” 

“You could own something down there, but you got to go. They had to pay you, but you couldn’t stay,” says Redwood. 

Redwood sees similar encroachments into the Hill District coming from the east side of the neighborhood via the University of Pittsburgh today. In the middle of our interview, he stops and draws a diagram of the Hill District to better understand his sense of the ways that the neighborhood has been reshaped through history. 

"We could eliminate poverty by shifting the US military budget [$860 billion] to help meet people’s needs."--Carl Redwood

‘The Hill District has a lot of different neighborhoods,” he says. “We call one part the Lower Hill; there’s another section we call Uptown; there’s a section we call Middle Hill and then there’s a section called the Upper Hill or Sugar Top.”

Geography matters. Redwood realizes the premium value of property, especially for those who are challenged with poverty and houselessness. To him, policies like eminent domain and the general drift of gentrification across a variety of Pittsburgh neighborhoods are consequences of capitalism.

“There were a couple big housing developments in our community,” says Redwood. “Most of which are no longer public housing and have been privatized. The residents have been forced out with a promise that they could come back, but they don’t really come back.”

To illustrate his point, Redwood quickly recounts the story of a small public housing community (734 units). All of the residents received vouchers in 2011 in exchange for leaving their homes and a promise that they would be able to return. 

“The plan was to get back to 400 [units], but they’re not even back to 400 yet. And those people are gone, and [their] kids are in school somewhere else,” he says.

According to Census data, the Black population in Pittsburgh has been in decline since the 1980s. Many Black families have been pushed into the post-industrial suburban counties surrounding Pittsburgh. Redwood sees the federal Section 8 program, which was designed to help low-income residents afford housing, among the city’s comprehensive housing problems. 

“Section 8 housing was an attempt to shut down public housing and turn over that revenue and income to private landlords,” he says.

Through Redwood’s eyes, the scope and scale of privatization efforts is expansive (and exhausting). He identifies similar systemic shifts toward private industry in public education and health care. 

“Bottom line – I’m a socialist. I’ve been a socialist for a long time,” he says. 

Mr. Redwood marks his movement birthday at some point in 1971, the same year he graduated from high school. He remembers anti-war organizers and activists criticizing and protesting against the Vietnam War. Around that time, he joined a YMCA-led high school intercultural exchange trip to Japan. He taught English at a summer camp there. 

“They were speaking English just as good as we did already,” he says.

By 1972, he became active with the African Liberation Support Committee, which was part of the Black liberation movement in the US. The ALSC “helped to build support for liberation movements in Southern Africa, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.

“Those liberation movements had an ideological basis of socialism of some kind,” he says. 

In 1984, he was Campaign Coordinator for Jesse Jackson’s Presidential Campaign. And through the 1980s and 1990s, he was an organizer in The Garfield Row Houses Tenants Association, The Homestead Unemployed Center, Hill House and Kingsley House.  

More recently, Redwood has been organizing locally with the Hill District Consensus Group, which works to give residents a voice in the decisions that affect their lives, and the Pittsburgh Black Worker Center, an organization that fights for living wage jobs and workers’ rights. 

Last fall, the organization released a study, The State of Black Workers in Pittsburgh, which found that 30% of Black folks in Pittsburgh live in poverty.

Carl Redwood, last month, at Freedom Corner near his office in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Photo Credit: Nate Guidry Photography

 “We have this scarcity in the midst of abundance,” he says, speaking about Pittsburgh and the US overall. “We could eliminate poverty by shifting the US military budget to help meet people’s needs. $860 billion was the last appropriation [approved by Congress]. That could do a lot. Instead it’s being put into weapons of mass destruction.”

"My parents both came up here from different parts of Virginia. They met in the Hill District, the neighborhood where I live right now"--Carl Redwood

Beyond eliminating homelessness and creating living wage jobs, at the top of Redwood’s socialist to-do list is also nationalizing the banking system, eliminating crushing student loan debt and ending the privatization of post-secondary education.

 “Certain corporations need to be nationalized, particularly the banking system and the whole concept of debt and how debt works.” 

For Redwood, socialism makes good common sense because it requires the organization of society to make every effort to meet the needs of the people. 



 “The profitable sectors of the economy need to be taken over and used to help benefit the vast majority of our families and our communities,” he says. “That’s what socialism is about.”

Norman Markel 1929-2023, Presente

We’ve lost a lifelong organizer, trade unionist and Socialist, Norman Markel, whopassed away on May 11th

Norman Markel was PhD Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida in Communication, Linguistics & Anthropology from 1964-2000.

He was the first state president of the United Faculty of Florida, NEA/AFT.

He was a member of the Tikkun Olam (Social Justice) Committee of Congregation Bet Haverim.

In 2013 he wrote The Politics of Conversation (Changemaker Publications). Citing Marx’s socioeconomic base/social superstructure metaphor, Norman Markel proposed that “conversation style” is a social superstructure that reproduces and reinforces a socioeconomic base. Specifically, a conversation style that is Hierarchical and Low Solidarity mirrors the capitalist socioeconomic base and contributes to an unconscious acceptance of the idea that autocratic and

alienated interpersonal relationships are human nature.

Noman was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1929. In an oral history he stated, “My

father drove a laundry truck, for 35 years. He was involved in organizing the

Teamsters Union in Detroit. The other thing that was important in my upbringing

was being raised in what was more or less a Jewish ghetto in Detroit. I remember

union meetings in our house with the kitchen door closed and cigar smoke coming

out from under the door.”

He went to public school and to welding school in Cleveland, Ohio. After

graduation he went off to be an organizer for the Jewish Youth Movement. He

organized from 1948 to 1949, and then went to Israel from 1950-52.

Upon returning to the US, he got a welding job at Budd Wheel in Detroit, and

became a member of the United Steelworkers. The USW had a college fellowship

for the children of union members, which he received. “The first paper I wrote was

the struggle over the River Rouge Bridge in Detroit, when anti-union thugs brought

out machine guns and shot down the people - the Battle of the Overpass.” His

college career led him to becoming a psychologist, with a specialty in linguistics,

and the first professor to have a faculty position as a psycholinguist.

He became a professor in the Communication Sciences laboratory at the

University of Florida. There he became active organizing a labor union for faculty

in the Florida statewide university system and was elected the first state president

of the United Faculty of Florida, NEA/AFT.

A lifelong socialist, Norman was a member of the October League and more

recently a member of CCDS.

He is survived by his wife, Dale Stratford, 3 sons and their spouses, 4

grandchildren, and a variety of nieces and nephews and grandnieces – all of

whom loved him and miss him so, and many other friends who admired him and

loved him dearly.

From the CCDS Peace and Solidarity Committee

Stephen David.and Harry Targ submitted the following written proposal. That this committee establish a Task Force on “International Relations: The New Reality.” The task force would have several responsibilities, including organizing a 4^th Monday webinar, maybe in September. Anyone interested in joining this commitee contact....

CCDS: A Proposal for a Way Forward

Stephen David/Harry Targ

CCDS conversations on Ukraine have not been very constructive. At best, we constrain our comments in the interests of not jeopardizing long established bonds. I doubt any level of discussion will get us over the impasse of rather entrenched positions. Whatever our positions may be, it is hardly possible that our views will bear a direct influence on the course and outcome of that struggle. So getting bogged down here is pointless.

On the other hand, the proposal that follows suggests the struggle in Ukraine is part of a larger global war that must concern us deeply. Moreover, it is in this area that we can find more meaningful commitment and political work; especially since it will radically affect us. There is no dispute over the fact that Ukraine operates as a proxy for a much larger imperialist struggle involving a Western hegemonic order led by the US.

We face a possible future in which the demise of the dollar as the chief currency of global trade and a multi-polar world architecture will have serious repercussions on a multitude of institutions that support the current Capitalist order. How this will affect our national and political economy and bleed into local social relations along class and racial lines is food for thought. On the other hand we would also have to consider how to take up the opportunities of living within a multi-polar world architecture.

It is in view of the latter that we think our immediate goals will be better served if we can strive to understand those possible social changes and insinuate that discussion as our present priority in our political engagement. A planned series of topics that comprehensively covers significant areas of our social relations can be a useful beginning.

Therefore, we recommend that the CCDS Peace and Solidarity Committee establish a Task Force on “International Relations: The New Reality.” This task force would involve some or all of the following:

 --periodic meetings of a core group

--organize a 4^th Monday webinar on the new international reality (maybe in September)

--network with other international groups such as the Tricontinental, Progressive International, scholars and activists in China

--produce a modest electronic journal on news and views about the NIEO, the BRICS, ALBA etc.

--prepare a useful book list or teaching materials on Prashad, Rodney, Amin, Frank, Dos Santos, etc.

 ********************************************************

On Dedollarization: 4 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkMgqg_wFuM&t=5s

For more information and to get involved contact: Harr Targ-[email protected] or stephen David-[email protected]

Monday, May 22, 2023

REAFFIRMING THE PROGRESSIVE PROJECT IN 2023

Harry Targ

These are indeed hard times for the vast majority of humankind. And the times are troubling for a number of reasons.

First, communities, nations, and the planet face the possibility of extinction of all life forms. Warning signs are seen everywhere: drought, fires, heat, cold, and the prospect of large swaths of land being flooded by global warming. And as has been the case for hundreds of years, the greatest threats and immediate suffering is impacting particularly on the peoples and lands of the Global South.

Second, despite years of wise counsel, mass movements, campaigns, and demands, the danger of nuclear war continues. Indeed, many experts and peace activists believe the danger of nuclear war is as serious now as at any time since 1945. Ironically, leaders of the G7 countries meeting in Hiroshima now are discussing what amounts to further fueling the war in Ukraine.

Third, along with these two life-threatening issues, every country and people have experienced poverty, inequality, anomic violence, and weakening educational and health care institutions, Pundits from the Global North report on food, health care, and educational deserts. But because a small number of conglomerates control more and more of what we know, what might be called media deserts reduce the possibility of people having knowledge about the crises facing them, their communities, and the planet. The metaphor of the “desert” speaks to the scarcity of peoples’ access to information about the viability of human life.

Fourth, and to some extent “the good news,” masses of people are rising up angry within the United States and around the world. Workers, students, people of color, women, and other oppressed groups are making their voices heard. And in some places movements have been impactful. In the United States elections have mattered: some for good, others for evil. And, in general, if the planet survives, so-called minorities will be majorities by 2050 (the rightwing fears this referring to what it calls “replacement theory”).

Fifth, one manifestation of people rising up angry is a new emerging sensibility and organizations coming from “the Global South.” The Global South, an imprecise construct, consists of all those peoples, territories, and nations that have been victimized by capitalism for hundreds of years. Today leaders of governments of various ideologies from the Global South have organized around trading zones, dedollarization and new military security arrangements, and the construction of new international organizations. They have revitalized demands for a New International Economic Order and a New World Information Order.

But sixth, while people are rising up angry all across the globe (and in  the belly of the beast the United States), they are doing so in an array of competing organizations characterized by a multiplicity of ideologies, issue priorities, and even multiple interpretations of the historical past and the present. As so often happens, many of these organizations claim that they are prepared to lead to a new world order. Organizational interest and individual egos get in the way of the broader project; that is saving humanity.



And this is part of the context of “Left” organizing in the United States today. It leads to raising again questions of our history, tactics and strategy, elections, street heat, and education.

Therefore, a number of issues of strategy, tactics,

and thought need to be reexamined.

 First, sectors of progressive movements use a catch-all term, “fascism,” to describe those political forces that are reactionary in vision and policy. The word  “fascism” provides a kind of release for sincere frustrations but is counter-productive for a variety of reasons. The term is usually not defined. The user and the target of the label logically think of Germany and Italy before World War II, but it is unclear that a comparison of the US political context today with the European countries in the interwar years is apt. Further, the concept usually suggests an inextricable connection between corporate control of the economy, an autocratic state, an armed mass movement and a racist ideology. While elements of these unfortunately exist in the US today the economic and political context is much more pluralistic than was the case in the 1930s in Europe.

Most importantly, the fascist label is resented and opposed by the targets of such a label. If the goal is to organize masses of people, particularly those who have become economically and politically marginalized by the system, such labeling creates enemies not friends. And polling data has shown repeatedly that majorities of Americans support progressive social and economic policies and even to some degree racial justice.

From the pre-civil war period until today approximately 20-25 percent of Americans have held and hold reactionary and white supremacist perspectives. Recent data suggests that some 45 percent of voters identify as Democrats, a few percentage points less Republicans, and about ten percent independents. Those who identify as independents have been less likely to vote. While reports of political surveys vary, the point is that the electorate and those who hold political views are varied and contradictory. And we should always keep in mind that the corporate media communicates, portrays, and sometimes exaggerates violence as the norm.

Second, much research suggests that there does exist a “politics of resentment” across the country, a resentment of alienation, powerlessness, and recognition that wealth and power are grotesquely unequal in its distribution. Often this resentment leads people to find solace in demagogues or more often to choose to not participate in what they regard as an unfair system.

The politics of resentment in this country led the Roosevelt Administration and the Democratic Party to begin to address real sources of economic pain and suffering in the 1930s. The Democratic party of the New Deal, The Fair Deal, and the Great Society was built around addressing some of the economic and political needs of the people. And as a result, on the national level, the Democratic Party became the majority party.

But in the 1970s, the Democratic Party tilted toward neoliberalism, primarily policies of austerity and deregulation of the corporate sector, a neoliberalism that was fully institutionalized in the 1980s Reagan Revolution. And it is important to note that the Reagan Revolution was sanctified by the Clinton/centrist wing of the Democratic Party which has become the dominant faction of that party ever since.

In short, there has been an inextricable connection between the rightwing thrust of national and state politics in the United States and the shift of the Democratic Party away from the New Deal tradition. For today and tomorrow, demanding a return to the reforms of the New Deal/Great Society period provides the only way to defeat the Right.

Labeling extremists as fascists, ridiculing Trump and MAGA, and rewriting narratives of US history will not defeat reaction. Only a progressive agenda will. And those progressives in the Democratic Party, in the labor movement, and among the sectors of the Left must demand that their candidates uncompromisingly stand for economic and social justice. For sure, there exist vital and popular movements around healthcare for all, women’s rights, the right to form unions, climate change, increased voting rights, support for public institutions such as schools, libraries, and transportation systems, immigration reform, and underlying each an end to the long, painful, and immoral history of racism in the United States.

Finally, and this is critical, a careful review of twentieth century US history shows that domestic and foreign policies are connected. In critical periods, US foreign policies have been used to crush progressive politics at home. As historians such as Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz and others have shown there was no Soviet threat to US national security when President Truman warned of the “international communist threat”  in his famous Truman Doctrine speech of March, 1947. But there was a threat at home. That threat was a strong, militant labor movement that sought co-equal input in the making of public policy.



In addition, from 1947 until 1991 the “communist threat” was the device used by policymakers to weaken or destroy a progressive and pro-labor agenda at home, and with decolonization around the world from the 1950s through the 1970s, socialist militancy all around the Global South.

Most importantly United States foreign policy became the rationale for trillions of dollars being spent on the military, creating images of diabolical enemies in education and popular culture, and normalizing the idea of war.

All this suggests that a progressive agenda in the years ahead requires:

1.A systematic progressive economic and political program that prioritizes the fulfillment of human needs.

2.A unified political movement that organizes around this program or at least building an alliance of Left groups that share this common vision even as they work on particular issues.

3.A grassroots organizing strategy that in word and deed does not prematurely identify critics with pejorative labels. Certain sectors of the population already embrace a progressive agenda, others are not yet decided, and a smaller percentage have embraced rightwing fascism. The task of the left should include mobilizing those who agree, convincing the unconvinced, and finally respectfully seeking to change the minds and actions of the minority who are reactionary (including those who believe only violence will protect them).

4.A progressive movement that reaches out to, participates with, and learns from the literally millions of people that are rising up all across the globe. At this stage in human history the campaigns of people of color and various nationalities in the Global South matter. And these movements parallel those of the poor and oppressed in the United States as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkMgqg_wFuM&t=5s



5.Finally prioritizing in this progressive project an anti-militarist, anti-war agenda. It is clear that the “permanent war economy” constructed after World War II robbed the world’s citizens of resources and hopes for a better future. A just world is a disarmed world, a world of peace.

Sunday, May 28, 2023

REMEMBER THOSE WHO PROTESTED WARS TOO! (Originally posted Monday, May 30, 2011)

 Harry Targ

"In a society where it is normal for human beings to drop bombs on human targets, where it is normal to spend 50 percent of the individual's tax dollar on war, where it is normal...to have twelve times overkill capacity, Norman Morrison was not normal. He said, 'Let it stop.' "(a gravesite speech by John Roemer at the funeral of Norman Morrison quoted in Hendrickson, Paul. The Living and the Dead. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996).

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison brought his daughter with him to the Pentagon. Outside the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Morrison set himself on fire to protest the escalating war in Vietnam. His daughter, Emily, somehow was passed to others and survived the flames. Morrison, however, died as he had lived, protesting the bombing of villages in South Vietnam, killing innocent men, women, and children.

I was part of an educational tour to Vietnam in March, 2011. We were taken to a powerful museum, known as the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. On the second floor an exhibit featured images of international solidarity with the Vietnamese people during the American war. Included there was a framed copy of an American newspaper account of Morrison’s self-immolation. Earlier, in Hue, we had seen an exhibit of the automobile used by a Buddhist Monk, Thích Quảng Đức, who killed himself in protest of the brutality of the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Presumably this act inspired Morrison’s tragic protest.

I had forgotten Morrison’s dramatic act, and the acts of several others who bravely sacrificed their bodies and lives to oppose the murderous war in Vietnam. As we celebrate Memorial Day this May 29,  I think about Morrison, the exhibit at the Vietnamese Museum, and parallel acts of self-sacrifice.

First, on reflection, I am in awe of the courage and self-sacrifice of the acts of these brave and principled people. Yet, I wish they had not made the ultimate sacrifices they did and had put their courage and willingness to sacrifice to the long-term struggles of the peace movement to end war.

However, I believe we must “take back” Memorial Days from those who celebrate war, see sacrifice only from those who kill and die, and ignore the bravery of the men and women everywhere who fight to end war. We mourn those who were sent off to fight in ignoble wars in the name of the United States. Also we must declare Memorial Day as a day to remember all the Norman Morrison’s who have said “no” to war and empire.

Well, it seems you CAN teach

old dogs new tricks.

Timothy Sheard began taking music lessons online during Covid from a fellow in New Orleans (He was 72 at the time). Before long he was composing songs...and then he wrote a musical. Now he's produced his first show: Song, dance and spoken word following THE ROCKY ROAD TO LOVE, performed by two veteran musical theater actors - Sabrina Rudden and Brian Mason - and by two stellar musicians - Nick Hampto and Brian Mason.

Now Tim is reaching out to clubs in the five NY boroughs to try and get work for his company, they are working actos and musicians hungry for jobs that pay.

Here is a link to the first production, performed at a new black box theater in Brooklyn: http://hardballpress.com/rocky-road-booking

Read Peace Action of Wisconsin Newsletter

We're trying something new, and you are all invited.

Saturday Morning Coffee!

A Zoom conversation with Carl Davidson and comrades from the Online University of the Left...and other places as well.

It will be more of a hangout than a formal setting. We can review the news in the previous days' Leftlinks, or add new topic. We can invite guests, or just 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 at point you would like to make or a guest to invite, send an email to Carl Davidson, [email protected]

Continuing weekly, 10:30 to Noon, EDT. The Zoom link will also be available on our Facebook Page.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86897065843 

Meeting ID: 868 9706 5843

Let's see what happens!

Watch a video of Saturday Morning Coffee

China: peoples congress, expanding economy, world stage

SEP's Fourth Monday in April