Photo: Rep. Conor Lamb pays his respects to Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 3.

By Mary Harris

Slate.com

JUNE 10, 2021 - Some people call Democratic Pennsylvania Rep. Conor Lamb a conservative. He prefers to think of himself as a compromiser, a moderate in a polarized political world. Because he was first elected as a Democrat in a district that also elected Donald Trump, he’s often seen as a bellwether, an object lesson in reaching the voters Democrats have lost ground with over the last few years.

So it surprised me that Lamb recently got on Twitter to voice his support for blowing up the filibuster. After watching the bipartisan push for a Jan. 6 commission fail spectacularly, Lamb says he felt like he had no choice—“the filibuster has to go.” On Thursday’s episode of What Next, I spoke to Lamb about why he’s taking this stand now, and what compromise means when there are fewer and fewer people to compromise with. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Conor Lamb: I think it’s still a little early in this process. I’ve noticed Washington, D.C., always moves a lot faster in conversation than people back here in my district, and so I am now every day on high alert for what’s happening to our democracy and what’s happening in these different states, and I’m not sure that the average person in my district is yet, particularly because you’re in Pennsylvania. We more or less are at a stalemate because we have a Democratic governor who’s not going to allow the legislature to do all these crazy things they’re doing elsewhere.

Yes. And they have tried. We just had a bunch of state legislators travel to Arizona to watch the phony recount. But I can say with a lot of confidence, having got to know my constituents over the last three years, that they would expect me to continue working for achievements and compromises on issues like infrastructure, even as we debate the fundamental issues of our democracy. And that actually makes sense to me.

In infrastructure, just to give you a quick example, there’s a lock on the Ohio River that makes it possible for barges to carry construction equipment and coal and all the things that they move on the river. It’s so old that it’s literally at a 50 percent chance of cracking in half and falling into the river in the next two years. And if that happened, not only the whole river would be shut down, but construction sites along the river would be shut down. People would lose their job. Traffic on the roads would increase. I mean, that’s a real scenario. If that happened, I don’t think anyone in my district is going to look at me and go, “Well, yeah, Conor, that’s not your fault because you were fighting with the Republicans about democracy.” I mean, there’s some basic stuff that we really have to try to get done for our people no matter what.

I would actually reverse it. I think that’s the case my constituents make to me on a pretty regular basis. And I agree with them. I think that we have to be able to do multiple things at once. But I’ll also say that my view on the filibuster, on the commitment to democracy that we have to have and the intensity with which we have to have that debate—that has evolved in three years. So I’m learning on the job and I’m trying to achieve this balance right now of working with the Republicans. And when I say the Republicans, really I’m mostly working with Republicans who did not vote to overturn the election. Many of the ones I’m working with voted to impeach Trump the second time.

I always challenge people to make sure we know what we’re talking about when we say we’re not getting results, because we actually have, even in the depth of the Trump era, we’ve gotten bipartisan results on important topics. The same week that we did impeachment in the House the first time, we did the USMCA [United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement], probably the most important trade agreement in the United States in the last almost 30 years, by a massive bipartisan vote. And there have been other examples like that. So it still does happen, even though people correctly perceive that we’re in much more partisan times.

But I think the last three years have taught me that the Republicans have really made this whole attack on the ease of voting, and more generally an attack on telling the truth and meaning what you say and basing your statements on facts and true observations about the world—they’ve really made it a core pillar of their party because they have tied themselves so tightly to Trump. I don’t think every Republican walking around thinks that way, but they have all made the decision basically that he’s the head of their party, and so now all that really matters is what he wants or what pleases him. And Jan. 6 really revealed just how dangerous and sinister of a development that that is.

There are many who saw all this coming. I think for me, once I saw it happen on Jan. 6, and particularly that night, when I saw so many of them still vote to overturn the election, I realized that we had kind of crossed the Rubicon with them and that there wasn’t going to be a negotiation on basic issues of truth and democracy and that we would have to fight for those things alone.

Once the attack happened and those people came back into the chamber, so determined to continue following the big lie and following Trump, I realized it just wasn’t about a point-by-point exposition of the evidence anymore. It was about something a lot deeper and more basic. And it was about putting the truth up front and center and not allowing things like respect and bipartisanship to actually become something that hides the truth from the people we’re supposed to represent. And that was a transition for me, to have to prioritize telling the truth in very raw and stark forms over the practices of bipartisanship that I had been working on for the last three years. …

It was not an easy thing to set aside the bipartisanship in that moment and talk about what was really happening. But it was really happening. And first things first, if we can’t agree to defend the Capitol, if we can’t agree to have a peaceful transition of power, the rest of it doesn’t really matter.

You just won a bruising election. Donald Trump had rallies supporting your challenger, Sean Parnell. You pulled it out by a narrow margin, 2 points, but then had to fight off Parnell in court—he was trying to get mail-in votes thrown out. The fact that you won your seat by a slim margin, some would say that’s an argument for a rule like the filibuster, like it’s a way to ensure legislators find some kind of common ground. I’m wondering if you can explain more why you disagree.

In theory you might think that was an attractive idea. But the evidence is pretty clear that in this polarized era, the filibuster has become nothing but a weapon to grind the Senate and therefore all of the lawmaking processes to a halt. And so I think if you look at that evidence and then you also look at the history of the filibuster itself—you know, it’s not in the Constitution. It has had many different rules over time. It’s been used differently for different purposes. But it definitely has this kind of anchor in the Jim Crow era. Nothing about it really suggests that it actually has been a tool for compromise.

And my own experience in Washington has been when you know that a bill is moving, people from both sides start to get on board because they want to attach something to it that’s long-held priorities of theirs and get it through. So I think if we took away the filibuster, we would probably see more bipartisanship in the short term, because all of a sudden people in the minority party in the Senate would say, “Well, this bill is going to move. I might as well get involved early to try to get what I want from it.”

I think there becomes a reason to act at that point. It’s just too easy for everyone not to act right now, if they know that the filibuster is going to block it. And then there’s the whole series of issues about the fact that the filibuster is basically done secretly now. It’s not a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington thing anymore, and I think that’s bad for the public as well. I think the public deserves to see more debates. ...Read More

The great Italian Marxist philosopher and organizer Antonio Gramsci points to the limits of education and intellectual argument in this passage on “Philosophy, Common Sense, Language and Folklore” from his famous Prison Notebooks:

June 7, 2021 - WASHINGTON (RNS) — The faith-led Poor People’s Campaign is planning a march in the home state of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin to protest the moderate Democrat’s recent decision to oppose voting rights legislation and efforts to end the Senate filibuster.

Poor People’s Campaign co-chair the Rev. William Barber announced via Twitter on Monday (June 7) that his group will stage a “Moral March on Manchin” next week. The march is in addition to a separate protest against Manchin and Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., later this month.

In an interview with Religion News Service, Barber said plans for the march came about at the request of activists in the state outraged by Manchin’s recent policy positions, which the pastor argued, “hurt poor and low-wealth people.”

“They said it’s time to march on his office,” Barber said. “It’s time for people of all differences to stand together against him — we call it ‘from the hollers in the mountains to the hood.’”

The march is in reaction to an editorial Manchin published over the weekend in The Charleston Gazette-Mail. Although Manchin expressed support for a bill known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, he stated in the editorial he would vote against the For the People Act, a sweeping voting rights bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in March and enjoys support from prominent Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

Warnock is among those who have expressed openness to eliminating the Senate filibuster to pass the bill, which would allow it to make it through the Senate with a simple 51-vote majority instead of the current requirement for a 60-vote supermajority. Similarly, the Poor People’s Campaign has decried the filibuster, which is seen by some activists as hamstringing efforts to pass an array of liberal-leaning bills.

But Manchin shot down hopes he would back such efforts in his editorial, describing the For the People Act as “partisan” and declaring he “will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster.”

Barber blasted the positions of Manchin, a Catholic, as incongruous with Christianity. 

“He claims to be a religious person, but the Scripture tells us in Matthew 23: ‘Woe unto those who tithe — who go through all the procedures — but leave undone weightier matters of the law, which is justice,'” he said.

Manchin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Barber noted representatives from the Poor People’s Campaign met with Manchin earlier this year to discuss, among other things, support for a $15 federal minimum wage (Manchin instead floated a lower figure). The meeting — which was requested by Manchin’s office after Barber’s group threatened demonstrations — included residents of West Virginia, one of several states where the Poor People’s Campaign regularly stages protests.

“We explained to (Manchin) why his defense of the filibuster was historically inaccurate and politically dangerous, and how his position against living wages was hurting over half of the workforce of West Virginia,” Barber said. He noted they also discussed how Manchin’s refusal to support the For the People Act “was hurting not just Black people, but white people, brown people and particularly poor and low-wealth people.”

Barber added: “Even if (Manchin) doesn’t change, we have to bear witness to how his policies are hurting the democracy, are a form of political and legislative violence, and that he is standing more on the side of the corporate lobbyists rather than poor and low-wealth workers and people across this country.”

Details of next week’s protest, scheduled for June 14, are still in flux. Although announced as a march, Barber said organizers are discussing the use of “other non-violent direct action.”

“Thousands upon thousands of people (in West Virginia) don’t agree with his economic position, or his position on voting rights, or his position on the filibuster — and it’s time for them to speak up,” Barber said. ...Read More

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Photo: Father Coughlin's bully pulpit. (Via Fotosearch / Getty Images)

By William Kovarik, 

Sound familiar? Well, this was 1938, and the individual in question was Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest with unfettered access to America’s vast radio audiences. The firms silencing him were the broadcasters of the day.

As a media historian, I find more than a little similarity between the stand those stations took back then and the way Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have silenced false claims of election fraud and incitements to violence in the aftermath of the siege on the U.S. Capitol – noticeably by silencing the claims of Donald Trump and his supporters.

Coughlin’s Detroit ministry had grown up with radio, and, as his sermons grew more political, he began calling President Franklin D. Roosevelt a liar, a betrayer and a double-crosser. His fierce rhetoric fueled rallies and letter-writing campaigns for a dozen right-wing causes, from banking policy to opposing Russian communism. At the height of his popularity, an estimated 30 million Americans listened to his Sunday sermons.

Then, in 1938, one Sunday sermon crossed the line. On Nov. 20, he spoke to listeners on the subject of the recent anti-Semitic Nazi rampage in Germany known as Kristallnacht – during which mobs of Nazis burned down 267 synagogues, destroyed 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses and arrested 30,000 Jews. Worldwide condemnation quickly followed. An editorial in the St. Louis Globe, for example, stated: “We stand in horror at this outbreak of savagery.”

Coughlin saw things differently. He blamed Jews for their own persecution and claimed in the sermon that the Nazis had actually been lenient. Only a few synagogues were burned, he lied, adding: “German citizen Jews were not molested officially in the conduct of their business.” And communists, not Jews, were the real targets of the Nazi mobs, according to Coughlin.

In the wake of these obvious lies, a New York radio station decided to break with Coughlin. “Your broadcast last Sunday was calculated to incite religious and racial strife in America,” said a letter from WMCA radio. “When this was called to your attention in advance of your broadcast, you agreed to delete those misrepresentations which undeniably had this effect. You did not do so.”

Other radio stations in major cities like Chicago and Philadelphia also canceled Coughlin’s broadcasts. Neville Miller, the president of the National Association of Broadcasters backed them up, saying that radio could not tolerate the abuse of freedom of speech.

Coughlin claimed that he’d been misrepresented, and that his intention had only been to stir sympathy for Christians persecuted by Communists. The Nazi press crowed at what they saw as American hypocrisy, saying Americans were “not allowed to hear the truth.” Meanwhile, Coughlin’s followers began showing up and protesting at radio stations where his broadcasts had been cut off.

FDR Anticipated the Controversy.

Dorothy Thompson, a newspaper columnist who had been expelled from Germany by the Nazis a few years before, asked her readers: “Have you been listening to the broadcasts of Father Coughlin?” He was clearly a threat to democracy, she said, and the FCC itself should take him off the air.

Coughlin’s radio empire continued eroding that winter and into the spring. With his pickets still protesting at radio stations, the National Association of Broadcasters changed its code to promote “fair and impartial presentation of both sides of controversial issues.” The code was originally established in 1929 to address issues like fair advertising practices. The revisions in 1939 prevented radio stations from selling air time for presentations from single speakers like

By the middle of the 20th century, this would become known as the paradox of tolerance. Philosophers like Karl Popper and John Rawls would insist that, at some point, a society’s tolerance should not be allowed to threaten its own survival.

For Americans who were unsure of how to deal with Coughlin, the paradox was solved by the advent of World War II. In January of 1940, the FBI caught 17 of his followers in a Nazi spy ring, and soon after, calls for more understanding of Nazis were flatly treasonous.

After the war, the idea that radio listeners should hear two sides of every controversy evolved from self-regulation by the broadcasting industry into the government’s “Fairness Doctrine” of 1949, which required broadcasters to allow responses to personal attacks and controversial opinions. It was enforced by the Federal Communications Commission and upheld in Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC in 1969. ...Read More

Last Week: Bill Fletcher on a variety of topics... Facebook link

Tune of the Week:  Margo Price / Jerry Williams Jr. (Swamp Dogg) - 'Sam Stone'

June 4, 2021 - In a telling anecdote from her childhood, historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall recalls her first fishing trip with her father, civil rights attorney Herman Midlo. What did she catch? “A hammerhead shark,” she recalls wryly. “Story of my life.”

As a metaphor, it’s pretty apt. Was the shark more than she wished for? A success — and a bigger catch — she hadn’t imagined or wasn’t prepared for?

In her new memoir, “Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle,” we see the story of her life, writ large and wonderfully. Born in 1929, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was determined to live a life that mattered — pursue an education, a life of political commitment, passionate love and meaningful work.

Writing a memoir is an act of claiming experience, owning memory. And in this book, Hall claims it all — a New Orleans childhood as the child of Polish immigrants, attending Tulane University, three marriages (most notably to Black revolutionary Harry Haywood for more than three decades), three children, time in Paris, a vagabond academic life teaching at various institutions before settling at Rutgers University, and now a life in Guanajuato, Mexico, where she lives with her son Haywood, an activist and physician, and his family.

In the background of a Zoom call — technology has ever been Hall’s friend — we hear the sound of birds, dogs barking and life all around her. It is easy to hear in her voice the feisty girl of the memoir, who found herself on the platform at the Southern Negro Youth Conference Convention when W.E.B. Dubois made his famous “Behold the Land” speech. “That was the first time I understood the power of history,” she said.

“My father taught me to be a revolutionary,” she said, “so I always had a sense of carrying on the family tradition.” Everywhere around her, she saw evidence of racism. The Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Circle showed her that “White racist thought was more open and crude and ridiculous here.” She never believed the sanitized version of history she was taught in schools.

As the years pass and she pursued her education, she crossed paths with history again and again. She was arrested at an interracial party in New Orleans in 1949 and was active in civil rights groups. As she grew older, she experienced the Black Power movement, the Red Scare, harassment by the FBI and the birth of feminism. As she writes, “I integrated myself into (the Black community), the Southern Negro Youth Congress, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Civil Rights Congress, the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reestablish the Communist Party.”

Some of the most moving passages in the book are devoted to her personal life, as she describes the difficulty of an interracial marriage, raising one son who had mental illness and two biracial children her own mother refused to accept. Hall’s path to success was never easy; she faced employment discrimination all along the way. But she persisted, and she endured.

She set out to make a difference, and she did. She devoted herself to scholarship dealing with the AfroAtlantic slave trade, earning her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, writing the landmark work "Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of AfroCreole Culture in the Eighteenth Century" (1992). In one wonderful moment — it sounds like every writer’s dream — she writes, “I got on the streetcar and everyone was reading my book!”

That led her to the great work of digitizing the slave records of Pointe Coupée Parish.

No late adopter, Hall understood early on how computers could revolutionize the study of history as well as making it more accessible to ordinary people looking to understand their ancestry. Her work on slave records inspired a story on the front page of The New York Times in 2000. She has also been honored for that work with the Gwendolyn Midlo Hall Allée at Whitney Plantation, where information from those records, about those lives, is carved in stone.

How the 'heroines of home economics' turned out to be a force for feminism and social change

“Haunted by Slavery” is illustrated with news clippings and photographs, giving it the sense of a scrapbook of a life filled with thought and action and achievement. Contemplating her 92nd birthday coming up later this month, she muses, “I’ve always been about 20 years ahead of my time, waiting for the times to catch up with me. This little bit of recognition that’s coming now is welcome.” She pauses and laughs. “I guess I’m lucky I lived so long.”

Susan Larson is the host of The Reading Life on WWNOFM. ...Read More

June 11, 2021 - Nicole Riegel's debut feature "Holler" is a film to treasure—an intimate drama about family and work, steeped in details that can only have been captured by a storyteller who lived them.

It follows a tough, resourceful high school senior named Ruth (Jessica Barden) whose family struggles to survive in a dying industrial community, and who is torn between leaving town to take her chances at college or staying behind out of a sense of responsibility to her big brother Blaze (Gus Harper) and her mother Rhonda (Pamela Adlon), a drug addict who's drying out in county jail. The characters are vividly etched and have a understated, wire-tough realness that has become increasingly rare in American cinema. 

But if you stand back and look at everything that happens, "Holler" is more than a coming-of-age story. It's a wrenching portrait of the United States in the early 21st century, a country that has lost whatever sense of collective responsibility it used to have, and is not only shredding what's left of its safety net but is selling off the remnants of middle-class life much like the metal scrappers at the center of this movie, who scavenge the town for resalable material because it's so hard to earn a halfway decent living otherwise.

The story is simple and straightforward: here is a town, these are some of the people who live there, and these are a few of the things they do to get by. Most of "Holler" is conveyed not through expository dialogue (except for a few necessary but clunky bits in the beginning) but caught-on-camera observation: we watch people work, play, communicate with their loved ones and coworkers, and move from point A to point B. As captured by Riegel, cinematographer Dustin Lane, and editor Kate Hickey, the result has the eerie you-are-there feeling of a documentary made by an invisible film crew that lived with the characters in their homes and workplaces. 

The film begins with Ruth running down the street holding two bags of cans she stole from a local business as an employee chases her on foot. She gets into a pickup truck driven by her brother Blaze. They head to a local scrapyard owned and operated by Hark (Austin Amelio), who gives them what they think is an unfairly low price.

Hark—a magnetic, long-haired, chain-smoking hustler of a character, played with gusto by Amelio, a costar of "The Walking Dead" and "Fear the Walking Dead"—tells Ruth and Blaze that times are tough and that's the best price he can offer, but if they want to make real money, they can join him and his crew on more complex and risky scrapping runs. These turn out to involve breaking and entering businesses to collect discarded piping and other bits of scrap and—the Holy Grail for scrappers—copper wiring and other material, which yields the best prices. Some of their targets appear to be abandoned, but others are functioning. It's low-level thievery.

Much of the first part of the movie is set in three main places: the ramshackle home where Blaze acts as temporary legal caretaker to his younger sister (the water was turned off before the start of the story and we never see it being turned on); the county jail where the siblings visit Rhonda; and a local frozen meal factory where Rhonda used to work, and where her best friend Linda is still employed, although there are rumors that layoffs are coming. Linda, a hard, wise woman with a wry smile, is played by the great character actress Becky Ann Baker—it's so great to see her, Adlon, Amelio and other superb, lesser-known actors being given believable, real-world people to inhabit. Their more colorful work is anchored to the lead performances by Halper (of "Cold Pursuit" and TV's "Madam Secretary") and Barden (of Channel 4's "The End of the F*****g World"), which are more quiet, reactive and internal.

Once Ruth and Blaze join Hark's scrapper team, the emphasis shifts, and the movie becomes a bit of a crime picture. The activity starts revolving around Hark's home in the woods, which has the feel of a party house or a gang's headquarters: beer, weed, deafening music, chortling pirate laughter, unnamed girls sitting on guys' laps, boastful recounting of prior exploits, macho preening. At one point, Hark shows off his crossbow. There are guns on the walls. 

You can tell that Blaze and (to a lesser extent) Ruth, who've lived a more sheltered life, are liberated by the feeling of danger and macho camaraderie that they experience in Hark's orbit. Nobody robs an armored car or a bank. It's not that kind of movie. But this type of scrapping is quasi-legal or illegal. And from the plethora of buzz saws and crushing machines to the risk of getting shot by security guards, there's no shortage of ways a person could get maimed or killed. Ruth is very good at her new job—so good that Hark starts grooming her as a sidekick, and perhaps something else—but she's also smart enough to know that the path she's heading down is a dark one.

"Holler" is a drum-tight movie (90 minutes, including credits) that has enough plot for a longer film, but packs it in with such economy that the story seems to expand in your mind as you recall it. The setting is based on Jackson, Ohio, the filmmaker's hometown, and much of the story is told from Ruth's point-of-view. It's easy to see where the script's sense of lived experience and emotional truth comes from. Unlike a lot of people in the entertainment industry, Riegel isn't the third or fourth person in a century-old showbiz dynasty, nor did she come from a family that made a comfortable living in some other business and comfortably supported her while tried to break in. Riegel grew up poor and served in the Army before turning to filmmaking. You can tell by the look and the feel of "Holler" that it was made by a person who is used to seeing beauty in places that we're told aren't beautiful, and looking for inner peace while living a life that could grind even the strongest person down. 

One gets the feeling Riegel could tell you many more stories about this place and its people, because they're her place, and her people. She knows this territory the way Ruth knows her own hands, which become increasingly battered and scarred by scrap metal work as the tale unfolds. Every frame has the aliveness of remembered experience, from the shots of plump stray cats climbing fences and loping through junkyards to the images of icicles melting, smokestacks billowing, and streetlights strobe-flashing overhead as a truck drives a dark road at night. 

Shot with available light on real locations with a handheld 16mm film camera, "Holler" has the creamy-grainy look of mid-20th century documentaries—the kind exemplified by the Maysles' brothers' "Salesman" and Barbara Kopple's "Harlan County, USA," where a tiny film crew would just go somewhere and spend time talking to the people who lived there, returning with a snapshot of what it was like to live their lives. It's a modest classic—hopefully the first of many from a major new voice in American cinema.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. ...Read More