Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism
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Trump Remains at the Heart of the Rightwing Coup Efforts
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The cartoon to the left sums up an important point: those storming the Capitol Jan 6 where minions led by a criminal fascist cabal at the top, with Trump at the center of it.
The main characters are easy to make out, such as Bannon and Guiliani. But the Jan 6 Hearings exposed them all yesterday, and let us know that the efforts to corrupt future elections are already being hatched and underway. Let's add some spanners and monkey wrenches of our own from below to stop them.
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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?
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We're going to try something new, and you are all invited.
Saturday Morning Coffee!
This week features Dan Swinney on New Economic Thinking for the Left
Starting Sat Aug 13, then weekly going forward.
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. Morst 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]
Starting Aug 13 and 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!
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This week on Saturday Morning Coffee, we will have a short presentation by Dan Swinney, on his new ideas for a progressive approach to economic matters--the importance of manufacturing, the inclusion of all, worker ownership, and new entrepreneurs from Black and Latino communities. Followed, of course, by discussion.
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Save the Date:
October 31st
Report on the results of the 20th Congress of the
Communist Party of China
Presentation by
Duncan McFarland,
cochair of the CCDS S
ocialist Education Project
Sponsored by
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
The Communist Party of China is holding its 20th Congress in Beijing starting on October 16, the first since 2017. The party leadership will be selected, including the Political Bureau and general secretary. Basic policy for the next five years will be determined, including China's long-term development plans and foreign policy, including US-China relations.
Studying the Congress' documents and results is invaluable to understanding the basic policies of the CCP especially at this sensitive time.
9pm-10:30pm ET, 8pm-9:30opm CT, 7pm-8:30pm MT, 6pm-7:30pm PT
Register in advance for this meeting:
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
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Chan Davis, Presente!
Davis died last month at 96. He faced down McCarthyite blacklists and imprisonment to pursue a brilliant academic career. Davis knew how to change and learn from political experience, but he always remained loyal to his socialist principles.
By Alan Wald
JACOBIN
Oct 13, 2022 - Chandler Davis (born Horace Chandler Davis and called “Chan” by his friends) was an internationally esteemed mathematician, a minor science fiction writer of note, and among the most celebrated political prisoners in the United States during the years of the high Cold War.
Dismissed from the University of Michigan (U-M) in 1954 for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on First Amendment grounds, he served six months in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut, then faced an academic blacklist that drove him to pursue a career in Canada.
The death of this endlessly resilient, lifelong radical at the age of ninety-six on September 24 in Toronto seems like the passing of an emissary from a world of the socialist Left that no longer exists. Despite errors of political judgment, which Chan was the first to acknowledge, he was for many of us a moral touchstone in our own decades of political upheaval and unpredictability.
A Red Diaper Baby
Chan came from a Communist family. His parents had joined the Party in the early 1930s and he happily enlisted in its youth group, Young Pioneers of America, while in elementary school. His father, Horace Bancroft Davis (always called “Hockey”), a descendant of Boston abolitionists and feminists, was a labor journalist and steelworker in the 1920s, completing a doctorate on the steel industry at Columbia University in 1934. His mother, born Marian Rubins, also did graduate work at Columbia...
The death of this endlessly resilient, lifelong radical seems like the passing of an emissary from a world of the socialist Left that no longer exists.
Chan, born in Ithaca, thus had a peripatetic childhood, including a year in Brazil. At the age of sixteen, in 1942, Chan was awarded the prestigious Harvard National Scholarship and entered Harvard College as an undergraduate. Throwing himself into a milieu of diverse radicals, he also began attending meetings of the Astounding Science-Fiction Fanclub. Immediately he gravitated toward a circle known as “the Futurians,” originally a Marxist tendency that evolved in the late 1930s in New York and included pro-Communists John Michel, Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, and Donald Wollheim, and later the Trotskyist Judith Merril (born Judith Grossman).
In 1943, Chan joined the US Communist Party (CPUSA) but soon withdrew (in accordance with Party policy) to participate in a Navy officers’ training program. Nevertheless, he managed to graduate from Harvard in three years. In the spring of 1945, he received a commission at a Naval Reserve Midshipman’s School, and then served on a minesweeper in Florida.
In 1946, he entered the Harvard Graduate School Department of Mathematics and published his first story in the May issue of Astounding Science Fiction, “The Nightmare.” Featured on the cover, which depicted the Statue of Liberty being decimated by an atomic bomb, it was the first known fictional narrative to deal with the subject of nuclear terrorism. Two years later, another piece in Astounding Science Fiction, “Letter to Ellen,” addressed genetic engineering. This was followed by another ten stories and a number of essays.
Rejoining the CPUSA in 1946 as well, Chan found that he was under discipline to keep his membership secret as he was not seen as sufficiently orthodox to be a public representative. As a campus activist, Chan joined the Federation of American Scientists, founded by former members of the Manhattan Project who favored international control and peaceful use of atomic energy.
He also became active in the efforts of the Progressive Party, formed to support the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. It was at a meeting of Young Progressives that he encountered a politically like-minded Smith College senior named Natalie Zemon, a student of early modern history. Within a few weeks, they decided to get married. The following year, she enrolled in graduate school at Radcliffe College, which enabled her to take courses at Harvard.
Going on the job market in 1950, Chan received an offer from University of California Los Angeles but drew back when he learned of the California Loyalty Oath requiring university employees to sign a pledge that they were not members of the CPUSA. With that in mind, he chose to accept a position as an instructor at U-M, a rank that could eventually lead to a tenured position. He and Natalie moved to Ann Arbor, where she continued her graduate studies. Chan remained a member of the CPUSA for the first years of his academic career.
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Time for the Big October Push to Beat the Right
By Eddie Wong
Convergence
Oct 12, 2022 - The heat is on: Early voting in the midterms has started. MAGA candidates are running strong. It’s not too late to get involved. Here’s how.
Early voting in the midterm elections is kicking off in several states, but it’s not too late to get involved in key races. Readers have already heard a lot about how critical these elections are for the future of US democracy, but the reasons bear repeating: The midterms will decide whether President Biden and the Democrats will be able to pass reform legislation in 2023 and 2024. Key races for governor, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and control of state legislatures will decide if there will be fair elections in 2024.
Major advances by MAGA forces will set the stage for their capturing Congress and the White House in 2024 (either through elections held under anti-democratic election rules, or through some form of coup). A second MAGA presidency would be worse than the first, with few restraints.
The broad democratic coalition (socialists, progressives, independents, moderates, and traditional Democrats) that defeated Trump in 2020 must once again meet the challenge of the highly organized and well-financed extremists who now control the Republican Party.
If our aligned forces can push back the Right in these midterms, we will be in a better position in 2024. If we can prevail in 2024, we can consolidate a multiracial working-class voting bloc, and the Left will be better positioned to advance major chunks of a more social democratic agenda for the long term.
Battleground states overview
The races to follow include state legislative fights, battles for Secretary of State and governors’ seats, House of Representatives races, and a few potentially game-changing Senate contests.
Increasing the number of votes for Democrats in battleground states helps lay the groundwork for more sweeping victories later. The outcomes of governors’ races may determine whether Republican-controlled state legislatures can further rig the electoral rules. The same is true with secretaries of state and attorneys general. Regarding the House of Representatives, Democrats have an uphill battle if they are to retain control. Nonetheless, in competitive races, a strong showing by Democrats makes it more likely they can prevail in 2024.
In the US Senate, Democrats have a chance to enlarge their majority and make it “Manchin- and Sinema-proof” which will be absolutely necessary, especially if Republicans re-take the House. In the most competitive races, Republican candidates are weak –– think Herschel Walker. And Senate races enable Democrats to mobilize urban and suburban voters. But we must take nothing for granted––again, think Herschel Walker; as weak as he is, polls show him being within striking distance, especially if turn-out among Black, Latinx and Asian American voters is lower than it was in 2020.
Arizona
What’s at Stake. The mid-term election in Arizona is hotly contested on many levels. The re-election of Sen. Mark Kelly is a must-win for Democrats. His opponent Republican Blake Masters, a staunch Trump election denier, recently scrubbed his campaign website of language accusing Democrats of trying to “import a new electorate,” an open endorsement of racist, xenophobic, and white supremacist ideology. State races and propositions are also highly charged, with Trumpers Kari Lake running for governor and Mark Finchem running for secretary of state.
The state legislature is narrowly controlled by Republicans, and they have used their majority to pass voter suppression laws and anti-abortion legislation. Flipping a few seats to the Democrats would blunt the right’s power and provide a safeguard against a Republican invalidation of the popular vote for president should a Democrat carry Arizona in 2024. Lastly, restrictions on voting will be on the ballot via Prop. 309 which would require voters to provide either a state-issued identification number or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers when they apply for an early ballot. Getting a state identification card adds a burden on people who for various reasons are unable to go through the application process.
The Mobilization. Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) has been a driving force that uses elections to build grassroots power, primarily for Latinx communities, for over a decade. The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials estimates a record turnout of 644,000 Latinx voters for the mid-term election––a four-fold increase in two decades. LUCHA also is part of an electoral coalition that brings together leaders from Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.
Native American voter turnout also was higher than usual in 2020 and hopefully, with the help of groups like Northeast Arizona Native Democrats, it will be again in 2022.
Arizona’s Asian American vote tends to favor Democrats, and groups like Arizona Asian Americans Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders for Equity Advocates are poised to replicate their voter turnout successes of 2020.
Key Dates. The deadline to request a ballot by mail is October 28. Early voting begins October 12.
Georgia
What’s at Stake. The Peach State is the focus of national attention given the high-profile campaigns of Stacey Abrams for governor and US Sen. Raphael Warnock, who is seeking re-election. Progressive State Rep. Bee Nguyen’s race for secretary of state is also exciting Asian Americans across the country as well as Georgia Democrats.
Hyper-awareness of the election has led to 1.6 million people registering in the past few months; 20% of Georgia’s voters have registered since the 2018 election, which is important given purges of the voter rolls in 2019.
The Mobilization. One notable effort is Georgia Poor People’s Campaign, which has a strong base among African American churches. They are inviting local organizations to host watch parties for the Oct. 17 National Revival services led by Rev. William Barber and Rev. Liz Theoharis. The Georgia Poor People’s campaign is also hosting simultaneous marches in Atlanta, Columbus, Valdosta, Savannah, and Macon on Oct. 15. The New Georgia Project Action Fund is opening 13 field offices across the state, aiming to knock on 700,000 doors, and turn out 150,000 new voters. Black Voters Matter, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and Showing Up for Racial Justice also are engaged in voter outreach and mobilization, hoping to build upon 2020’s successes.
Key Dates. Early voting begins on Oct. 17 with Saturday voting on Oct. 22 and Oct. 29. Sunday voting occurs in select counties on Oct 23.
Nevada
What’s at Stake. Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto has seen her lead over challenger Adam Laxalt narrow in recent weeks. Adam Laxalt was the chair of Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign in Nevada, and campaigns on the Big Lie that the election was stolen. A strong increase in voter registration among women could boost Cortez-Masto’s chances, as Laxalt staunchly favors the reversal of Roe v Wade. Latinx voters make up 20% of the electorate and strongly favor Masto.
The races for governor and secretary of state are also generating excitement and anxiety in Nevada. Democrat Gov. Brian Sisolak is running for re-election against Trump-endorsed Joe Lombardo, the sheriff in Clark County (Las Vegas). Pundits consider this race to be dead even. In the secretary of state race, former state assembly member Jim Marchant claims the 2020 election was stolen by Biden. He is opposed by Democrat Cisco Aguilar, a lawyer and member of the state athletic commission. A poll released Oct. 2 showed Marchant leading by eight points. ...Read More
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Photo: Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) gavels the end of a hearing by the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C, on July 21, 2022. (Photo by Alex Brandon / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)
Democrats Need to Make the January 6 Attack an Election Issue
Neglecting the role that Donald Trump and his allies have already played in assaulting democracy is political malpractice.
By John Nichols
The Nation
Oct 13, 2022 - The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has established that Donald Trump was the central figure in a coup attempt that sought to install Trump as an illegitimate pretender president for a term he did not win.
Holding what could be its final hearing on Thursday, the committee has done the meticulous work of placing the former president at the center of a conspiracy to upend democracy that involved not just Trump and his closest aides but also key figures in Congress and the states—a number of whom are seeking election on November 8.
Yet Democrats seem to be wrestling with whether to focus on what happened on January 6, 2021, as a 2022 election issue. Throughout this challenging midterms season, we’ve seen reports that, as an August Politico headline put it, “There’s a Huge Divide Among Democrats Over How Hard to Campaign for Democracy.” The article explained that “Democrats competing in elections this year have not been pressing the issue anywhere near as hard as other concerns.” In fact, political ads mentioning the insurrection accounted for less than 4 percent of all Democratic spending at the time, according to Politico.
That’s a misguided strategy that needs to be rethought as midterm voting begins.
Of course, there are other issues candidates must address—abortion rights, price gouging and inflation, the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and an increasingly unstable international circumstance. But to neglect the role that Trump-aligned Republicans have already played in assaulting democracy is political malpractice. Even if viewership of the January 6 committee hearings has waned since they began in June, the threat to democracy that they have illustrated remains very real—and very potent as a political issue with the voters Democrats need to mobilize in advance of the November 8 election.
What happened on January 6 was jarring in and of itself. But the shock to the system did not begin or end on that day. It pointed to threats to democracy that have only become more significant as the midterms approach. Dozens of insurrectionists—extreme right-wing activists who went to Washington at Trump’s behest and who were at or near the Capitol when it was attacked by his supporters—are running as Republicans for top posts in states across the country. They all deserve to be called out for their embrace of lawlessness. The same goes for Republicans in office who refuse to break with Trump over his Big Lie about the 2020 election. Advocates for democracy should take every opportunity to remind voters about what’s at stake if they lose and if Republican insurrectionists and their allies win on November 8.
US Representative Liz Cheney recognizes this duty. In an early October appearance organized by the John McCain Institute at Arizona State University, the Wyoming Republican who serves on the January 6 committee warned that the GOP has a growing “Putin wing” that refuses to defend democracy.
“In Arizona today you have a candidate for governor in Kari Lake, you have a candidate for secretary of state in Mark Finchem, both of whom have said—this isn’t a surprise, it’s not a secret—they both said that they will only honor the results of an election if they agree with it,” Cheney told ASU students. “They’ve looked at all of that, the law, the facts and the rulings, the courts, and they’ve said it doesn’t matter to them.”
“We all have to understand that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney bluntly added.
Democrats should be just as blunt.
It’s the right thing to do. It’s smart politics. And a few Democrats have provided a template for how to get it right, by recognizing that, at a time when Republicans are pouring millions of dollars into TV ads that falsely paint Democrats as soft on crime and anti-police, Republican insurrectionists and their allies are vulnerable on these issues. In Ohio, Representative Marcy Kaptur has used the issue to devastating effect against scandal-plagued Republican challenger J.R. Majewski, an incendiary extremist who was in D.C. on January 6 and who enjoyed enthusiastic support from House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Kaptur hit Majewski hard in her first ad for the fall campaign, which described the Republican as an “extremist candidate for Congress” and made specific references to the Capitol attack. The Kaptur ad portrayed Majewski as someone who “blames the police” for violence on January 6, and Kaptur as the candidate who “supports law enforcement.” The message, and allegations that Majewski inflated his military record, look to have tipped the balance toward Kaptur.
In Wisconsin, where US Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, a Democrat who has been one of the chief targets of Republican attack ads, has been trailing narrowly behind incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson in recent polls, Barnes focused on January 6 issues during a debate last week with the millionaire incumbent.
After Johnson attacked Barnes for supporting cash-bail reform in order to assure that nonviolent offenders aren’t jailed simply because they lack the money to pay for bail, the Democrat explained why the reform is a matter of equity. He said, “Now, Senator Johnson may not have encountered a problem he could not buy his way out of, but that’s not a reality for the majority of the people in this state.” That threw the wealthy Republican for a loop and he tried to suggest that Barnes’s policies were disrespectful toward the police. The Republican claimed he went out of the way to show that respect. Barnes replied, “The senator, on the last question did mention police officers. Now, with that being said, I’m sure that he didn’t have the same interaction with the 140 officers that were injured during the January 6 insurrection. One officer was stabbed with a metal stake. Another crushed in a revolving door. Another hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. So when we talk about respect for law enforcement, let’s talk about the 140 officers that he left behind—because of an insurrection that he supported.”
That wasn’t the only point at which Barnes reflected on the insurrection to hit back against the incumbent. When the senator—who tried to deliver slates of fake electors to Vice President Mike Pence—attempted to downplay the seriousness of the violence, Barnes was ready. “He may not have noticed that an insurrection was happening because he called those people ‘patriots.’ He called them ‘tourists.’ These are the folks that he supported. This an act that he supported,” said the Democrat. “He can make whatever comparisons he wants to. But the reality is, this was an attempted overthrow of the government by trying to overturn a free and fair election.”
It was one of the most powerful moments of the debate for Barnes—so powerful that his campaign would be wise to make it part of the October advertising campaign that will be needed to close the gap with Johnson. Why? Because what Republicans like Johnson did on January 6, 2021, and what they have said and done since then, remains at the top of the list of issues concerning Democrats, according to a recent NBC poll.
In a midterm election where mobilizing the base is essential, January 6 is an issue that can move voters—if Democratic candidates are prepared to talk about it.
John Nichols is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and the author of the new book Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis (Verso). ...Read More
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Photo: State Senator Doug Mastriano at the “Hear Us Roar” rally in Harrisburg on January 5.
Doug Mastriano Holds Event With Extreme Right-Wing Commentator as Election Day Approaches
By Brett Pransky
The Keystone
OCT 4, 2022 - The Mastriano campaign recently held an event with Jack Posobiec, an internet conspiracy theorist and commentator known for creating and amplifying conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate.
In most campaigns for political office, the tendency is to play at the base in the primary, and then shift or modify the tone in the general election in order to appeal to a larger, more general audience.
But as Republican Doug Mastriano’s campaign for governor heads into the home stretch of the 2022 campaign cycle, hoping to convince the people of Pennsylvania to elect Mastriano to be the next governor, they are not in any way moderating their message.
Instead, they are going from extreme, to more extreme, to hard-to-believe extreme.
On Oct. 1, the Mastriano campaign held an event with Jack Posobiec, an internet conspiracy theorist and commentator from what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “the anti-democracy hard right.”
Posobiec came to prominence during the 2016 presidential race “while working as an operative for the Roger Stone-linked 501(c)4 organization Citizens for Trump.” His litany of conspiracy theories is long and often nonsensical, and it includes a significant role in the Pizzagate series of lies that became popular during the 2016 presidential campaign and led one disturbed man to fire a loaded weapon in a crowded restaurant, leading to his arrest and a sentence of four years in prison.
The Pizzagate conspiracy theory alleged that children were being trafficked by a cabal of prominent Democrats, and that the crimes were being committed in the basement of a pizza place in Washington, D.C. Not only were the claims false, but the restaurant in question didn’t even have a basement.
When given the floor at the Mastriano rally last weekend, Posobiec made several statements about polling and fundraising and of course, crowd size, and about how Mastriano’s lagging numbers in each area are not, in fact, a sign of any weakness in his campaign, but instead simply media creations designed to hide the truth.
“We are going to take Pennsylvania back,” he said.
Posobiec, surprisingly, made no claims about hidden children anywhere in the facility where the event was being held.
While the final days of any campaign typically involve appealing to undecided voters and those who have not yet made a decision, Mastriano is doubling down on his extremism by platforming some of the most egregious abusers of truth and decency that the fringe-right has to offer.
As Election Day approaches, Mastriano may not be leading in the polls, but he’s leading in toxicity by a wide margin.
Brett Pransky is a Pennsylvania-born writer, political analyst, and media producer with graduate degrees in Rhetoric and Business and a sharp disdain for deception or spin. ...Read More
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Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture:
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Photo: A protest outside the Monroe County Courthouse in Bloomington, Indiana, in September, after the Indiana legislature passed an abortion ban. JEREMY HOGAN/SOPA IMAGES/ LIGHTROCKET /GETTY IMAGES
The War for Democracy in America Will Be Lost—or Won—in the States
States were meant to be 'laboratories of democracy.' Instead, they are pioneering new ways to restrict voting and distort representation.
By Nancy MacLean
The New Republic
Oct 5, 2022 - In his concurrence with the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Brett Kavanaugh made a familiar argument about the states. “The Court’s decision properly leaves the question of abortion for the people and their elected representatives in the democratic process,” he wrote, by allowing “the numerous States” to decide the matter.
Kavanaugh’s claim rested upon an abiding myth: that state governments are more accurate representations of the will of the people and therefore more democratic than the federal government.
But are they? This is the question at the heart of Jacob M. Grumbach’s landmark book, Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. While many recent books, understandably, fixate on Donald Trump’s menace to democracy, Grumbach proposes that “it was the states that were the wrecking ball [of democracy], clearing a path for Trumpism throughout the American political system.” By undermining labor unions, for example, Republican states have driven down Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, beginning with Wisconsin under Scott Walker and spreading to Michigan and beyond. Research has shown that the passage of state right-to-work laws on average reduces Democrats’ share of the presidential vote by 3.5 percent. Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan by less than one percentage point.
At the state level, the views most likely to prevail are not those of the people but of powerful corporations. Corporations use the threat of taking their operations to a different, more favorable state, in order to coerce state governments into giving them tax incentives, regulatory relief, and other benefits that can—and often do—outweigh the value of the employment they provide. The rivalry they set off among states works in their favor to lower wage and other standards, as federalism’s current advocates on the right well understand.
Well-resourced players gain even more leverage from the catastrophic decline in media coverage of state politics. The number of full-time reporters on this beat bled down by a third in just the decade from 2003 to 2014. The same period saw the rise of social media, which directs attention toward divisive national issues. Without robust local media to keep the focus on candidates for state office and their policies, state governments have become “voters’ ‘electoral blind spot.’” State legislators have the ability to operate in the dark. This, combined with their relative inexperience and lack of resources, leaves state legislators particularly in thrall to capital and wealthy donors.
Even the most unpopular state actions are rarely punished at the polls. When the state legislature of Wisconsin, long a moderate pro-choice state, enacted one the nation’s most restrictive gestation limits on legal abortion in 2015, the legislators who voted for it faced no penalty—even though public opinion was becoming more liberal on the issue. Similarly, even as public support for increased education spending grew, state governments cut education budgets. The exceptions Grumbach finds are telling: Only on LGBTQ rights and marijuana legalization has public opinion led to changes in state policies—responsiveness that cost nothing on issues that are also easy for voters to understand and monitor.
The relative inability of even the most attentive citizens to hold state legislatures accountable for serving special interests is compounded by gerrymandering, which has profoundly distorted the voters’ will. My own state, North Carolina, is a case in point: In 2018, Republicans won less than half of the vote, yet the legislative map they created awarded that minority party 10 of 13 congressional seats (77 percent) and a near supermajority in the state legislature. One expert Grumbach cites calls this “the most gerrymandered map in modern history.” Its shameless designer said he would have drawn the districts to ensure 11 seats for Republicans and only two for Democrats if he could have found a way. These are the deformed systems of representation that are deciding state policy on abortion, education, health care access, the penal system, and much, much more. They bear no resemblance to those Justice Kavanaugh imagines in his paeans to the virtues of federalism.
A quantitative political scientist, Grumbach has developed a new and sophisticated method to measure just how bad things have gotten in many places, including North Carolina and Wisconsin, which saw “precipitous drops in democratic performance after 2010.” His “State Democracy Index” compares changes in states between 2000 and 2018 across multiple measures, such as the difficulty of voter registration, the extent of gerrymandering, the criminalization of protest, incarceration rates, election turnout rates, voting wait times, and more. What it reveals is a systematic divergence between states based on which party controls government, with many Democrat-controlled states providing for more robust democracy and Republican-controlled states devising ways to constrict it.
Grumbach deploys his impressive tool kit to solve an important puzzle: Why has policy changed so dramatically in so many states, particularly “red” states, without significant shifts in public opinion? After all, there was little demand among ordinary voters for most of the stark policy changes that many legislatures enacted, from anti-union measures to radical gerrymandering to steep cuts in taxes on corporations and the wealthiest residents, let alone their rejection of Medicaid expansion, curbing of environmental protections, and adoption of Stand Your Ground laws, which in Florida notoriously enabled Trayvon Martin’s killer to escape punishment.
Grumbach offers two answers. One starts from the fact that in the majority of states today, one party has control over the state assembly, state Senate, and the governorship. Republicans currently hold 23 trifectas, and Democrats 15. Only 12 states have divided government. As a result of this development, Grumbach argues, the national parties have seen an opening to focus on the states, where they can pass agendas that would face gridlock in Congress. ...Read More
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Donald Trump Has Learned How to Manipulate White Rage — That's Very Dangerous
Donald Trump's litany of racist grievances is petty, boring and false. The scary part? He speaks for millions
By Chauncey Devega
Salon.com
OCT 13, 2022 - American democracy is in peril, teetering between democracy and authoritarianism and under siege by Donald Trump, the Republican Party and the larger white right. To call them "conservative" is an insult to language.
In a recent Salon essay, historian Robert McElvaine addressed this directly, calling out "the media's ingrained tendency to aid and abet the enemies of democracy through the careless use of language," and especially "the ubiquitous use of the word 'conservative' to describe extreme right-wing radicals and their beliefs, which only seek to conserve white supremacy — and more specifically the class or caste supremacy of a small minority of wealthy and nominally Christian white men."
Even President Biden, a career politician and a conflict-averse lifelong moderate who still yearns to "unite" America, has publicly warned that the "MAGA Republicans" — which at this point means nearly all Republicans — are the greatest internal threat to the country since the civil war.
America's democracy crisis is a drama of raw political power, and a nationwide campaign by the Republican fascists to end America's multiracial democracy. If they prevail, Black and brown people, most women, LGBTQ people, those with disabilities, non-Christians (or liberal Christians), immigrants, poor people and anyone else targeted as the Other more generally (and thus deemed "un-American") will literally become second-class citizens both under the law and in daily life.
What does MAGA mean in 2022? An aging movement longs for an America that never was
Many Americans who believe they are safe from American fascism because of the color of their skin, their money or other forms of privilege will rapidly learn that their freedom, safety and quality of life will be greatly diminished as well. In a recent Salon interview, author and activist Brynn Tannehill summarized this harsh reality:
Everybody who watches a zombie movie assumes that they're going to be part of the resistance and not part of the shambling, undead brain-eating horde. All these people assume that under a fascist system they are going to be among the winners. There are many more losers in a fascist system than winners. The winners make sure that their people get taken care of first, and if you're not near the front of the line for the goodies you aren't going to get them. The vast majority of Americans are not going to be rewarded by fascism.
American fascism is not a foreign import or unimaginably alien. It is in our soil, and in many ways a continuation of this continent's long history of white supremacy and racism going back to the 17th century. Trump and the other neofascists are like political necromancers: They summoned up these dark, lingering energies and are now using them for their own purposes.
Trumpism, like other forms of neofascism and fake right-wing populism, is based on a cult of personality and pathological feelings of shared identity between the leader and the follower. Any criticism of the leader is experienced as an attack on the follower, and an existential threat to one's racial identity and core sense of self.
Trump's anger is rooted in the assumption that a rich white man is above the law — and that it's a violation of the natural order for a Black woman to have any power over him.
As Donald Trump faces the real possibility of finally being held accountable for his many obvious crimes, whether those be fraud, seditious conspiracy or violations of the Espionage Act, he will incite and channel even more white rage and white tribalism. He will urge his acolytes and followers to tear the country down rather than see him face justice. He will urge them to do so again if he or his party are somehow defeated at the polls in the upcoming midterms or the 2024 presidential election.
Words presage action; depending on the context, words and language can be a type of violence. Donald Trump has repeatedly said that the prosecutors who are investigating him for alleged crimes in New York and Georgia — all three happen to be Black — are "racist," "horrible" and "mentally sick" people who are unfairly targeting him, and by extension his overwhelmingly white followers.
The assumption here is that white people, especially rich white men, are above the law and moreover that it is a violation of the natural order of things, or American "tradition," that Black people (and Black women in particular) could in any way potentially have so much power.
AP reporter Bobby Calvan interviewed a communications scholar about how "Trump's rhetoric has escalated, perhaps because he recognizes that some among his base are receptive to more overt racism":
"It intensifies that discourse and makes it explicitly racial," said Casey Kelly, a communications professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who for years has pored over transcripts of Trump's speeches.
At a recent rally in Arizona, he said — falsely — that white people in New York were being sent to the back of line for antiviral treatments.
And now Trump is using the investigations against him — and the prosecutors behind them — as "evidence of a larger systemic pattern that white people don't have a place in the future of America and he's the only one that can fight on their behalf," Kelly said.
Michael Steele, who more than a decade ago was the first African American to chair the Republican National Committee, said Trump was being Trump.
"If he can race bait it, he will. These prosecutors, these Black people are coming after me — the white man," Steele said….
Trump is questioning their legitimacy, said Diana Becton, another Black district attorney who serves in Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay area.
"His accusations are certainly not subtle. They're frightening," Becton said. "It's like saying, we are out of our place, that we're being uppity and we are going to be put back in our place by people who look like him." ...Read More
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Photo: Employees work inside a Lowe's store on August 2, 2019, in Los Angeles, California.
MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES
Lowe’s Workers in New Orleans Petition to Form Company’s First-Ever Union
BY Sharon Zhang
Truthout
Oct 13, 2022 - Lowe’s workers in New Orleans have filed a petition to unionize, seeking to become the first unionized location of the home improvement company’s 1,723 U.S. stores.
According to the filing posted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the union would cover 172 workers at the store, including sales associates and those on fulfillment, merchandising and receiving duties.
Workers are unionizing under the name Lowe’s Workers United, according to the filing. It’s unclear if this is an independent union or if it is affiliated with an established labor union. If it is independent, the Lowe’s workers will join a growing number of workers who have successfully unionized at companies like Amazon or Trader Joe’s under an independent effort.
The company already appears to have hired union-busting lawyers from law firm Barnes & Thornburg, who are listed as legal counsel for the company on the union filing.
Indeed, the company has had a history of opposing unions; a training video made by the company that has circulated the internet for a number of years contains multiple anti-union talking points and encourages managers to call an internal “labor hotline” if there is unionizing activity among the employees.
If the company doesn’t voluntarily recognize the union, which it is reasonable to assume it will not, at least 30 percent of eligible workers must sign a union card in order to qualify for a union election conducted through the NLRB.
Data shows that workers at Lowe’s Home Improvement stores are often paid low wages. According to the Economic Policy Institute, about half of Lowe’s workers are paid less than $15 an hour. Other research has found that, in 2020, the median salary for full time retail workers at the chain was a mere $24,000, or only about $11.50 an hour.
The minimum wage in New Orleans is $13.25 an hour. A living wage for New Orleans — even for a single adult with no children — is $16.32 an hour, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator.
The salaries of the unionizing Lowe’s workers are unclear. However, Lowe’s was among the companies that spent more on stock buybacks than on worker raises in 2021, spending $13 billion on buybacks.
The filing comes on the heels of a recently announced union drive at another home improvement equipment store. Last month, workers for a Home Depot in Philadelphia filed to unionize under an independent union named Home Depot Workers United. If workers are successful in their union election, slated for November 2 and 5, they will become the first to form a union within the company.
Vince Quiles, one of the lead organizers in the Home Depot effort, expressed solidarity with the Lowe’s workers in a tweet on Thursday.
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To Fight for Equality in Connecticut, a New Coalition Takes Shape
By Rob Baril
& Puya Gerami
NPQ
Oct 12, 2022 - There isn’t one Connecticut—there are two. For those of you unfamiliar with this state, its name likely conjures images of affluent and predominantly white towns like Greenwich, Westport, and Glastonbury.
But then there is the Connecticut where most residents live, struggling multiracial communities such as Norwich, Bridgeport, and Waterbury. The two Connecticuts exist side by side in adjacent zip codes, sometimes in the same zip code. A baby born in the first will probably grow up in an environment offering all the material resources necessary to pursue a healthy, happy, dignified life; a baby born in the other will probably face a life of unnecessary hardship brought on by austerity.
Connecticut thus presents a microcosm of the US’ extreme racial, economic, and gender inequalities. It consistently ranks as the wealthiest state in one of the wealthiest countries that has ever existed. Yet, the vast majority of our residents strain to make ends meet.
As the crises of the 2020s widen the chasm between the two Connecticuts, a new statewide coalition called Recovery For All has formed to eliminate that chasm. Anchored by unions that practice Bargaining for the Common Good, the coalition unites 59 labor, community, faith, and nonprofit advocacy organizations in a long-term mission to shift the balance of power at the state level and enact public policy that will create a more equitable future.
Building Power Through an Inside-Outside Strategy
While the need for a coalition like Recovery For All has been evident to many local organizations for some time, the pandemic provided the impetus for its creation. Seismic developments over the last two years have intensified Connecticut’s extreme disparities, heightening urgency for united action. Consider two statistics: on the one hand, our 12 resident billionaires have seized more than a billion dollars in additional wealth apiece since the pandemic’s start. On the other hand, as a recent Oxfam report shows, almost half of all Black and Brown women in Connecticut—the very people frequently hailed as essential workers—earn poverty wages. While the state’s wealthy few prosper, working people are caught in a vise between rising costs of living and stagnant earnings.
The perilous situation that working people confront today is rooted in flawed public policy enacted long before the coronavirus pandemic began. For decades, lawmakers who formulate state budgets have at best ignored and at worst exacerbated racial, economic, and gender inequalities. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, elected officials in Connecticut responded to budget deficits by shrinking state and local services, starving nonprofits, and slashing public funding. The organizations that would come to establish Recovery For All understood that these austerity measures were the result of a manufactured fiscal crisis.
To borrow an unforgettable phrase from the Chicago Teachers Union, a pioneer of Bargaining for the Common Good, we understood that the state wasn’t broke, but instead “broke on purpose.” After all, in a state of such extraordinary wealth, it was certainly possible for lawmakers to pass policies that would expand rather than erode the public resources residents need to survive and prosper. Chronic disinvestment in our communities, especially communities of color, was not inevitable or accidental—it was a political choice, based on a particular balance of power stacked against working people.
Today, in a time of social upheaval, we are reaping the consequences of that political choice. For organizations fighting for a more equitable future, the current moment has renewed determination to build the kind of strategic unity necessary to shift the balance of power and win state budgets that will transform the lives of working people. These organizations have been accustomed to operating in silos, each seeking to win its priorities on its own. Now they are hungrier than ever to build a durable coalition. Instead of short-term alliances, Recovery For All seeks to build long-term alignment; instead of compartmentalizing or neglecting fights for racial, economic, and gender justice, we embrace all as intertwined and indispensable; instead of relying on lobbying and other traditional forms of advocacy, we believe that exerting our power through mass action is the only pathway to progress.
Representing hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life, the diverse organizations that comprise Recovery For All share not only outrage with the state’s extreme disparities, but also a positive vision of the common good. All seek to win dramatic investments in education, health care, housing, and social services—the public programs and services our communities rely on but which have endured endless cuts. To fully fund these investments, the coalition is leading the push to fix the state’s regressive and unsustainable tax structure. A state government analysis published this year showed that Connecticut’s poor and working-class residents contribute a much greater share of their income in state and local taxes than billionaires and multimillionaires, while another report from the Economic Policy Institute revealed that most corporations in the state, including those with annual income greater than a billion dollars, contribute nothing or next to nothing. Closing the divide between the two Connecticuts requires bold revenue and investment measures that center the needs of working people, in particular residents who continue to face historic oppressions, including people of color, women, and immigrants.
To fight for this vision, Recovery For All deploys our people power through an inside-outside strategy. Inside the legislative arena, the coalition mobilizes hundreds of members from across our affiliated organizations to testify at public hearings and persuade their elected officials through in-district meetings. The coalition has organized a bloc of more than 40 state legislators who champion our vision, participate in our actions, and advance our bills at the state capitol. We have also organized dozens of direct actions outside in the streets, including rallies, prayer vigils, car caravans, and marches. Direct actions draw attention to the suffering that Connecticut residents are experiencing, amplify our demands, and deepen relationships across our organizations. This commitment to showing our strength in numbers in multiple arenas has begun to challenge the reign of austerity and alter the terms of debate over the state budget.
Bargaining for the Common Good Leads the Way
While Recovery For All advances our vision in the legislature and the streets, affiliated organizations do so at the bargaining table. One of the coalition’s key strengths are its unions, which are committed to and leading Bargaining for the Common Good. The model of such leadership is SEIU 1199 New England, a union representing nearly 30,000 healthcare workers employed in nursing homes, hospitals, home care, group homes, and state agencies across Connecticut. Overwhelmingly women and disproportionately Black and Brown, these care workers have put their bodies on the line to keep society afloat. During the pandemic, thousands of members got sick, 22 ended up losing their lives, and some lost loved ones after bringing Covid-19 home from work.
Over the last two years, SEIU 1199 New England has shown how Bargaining for the Common Good works by practicing an innovative form of sectoral bargaining, or bargaining that covers working conditions for most workers in an industry. Rather than negotiate contracts one by one, the union negotiated all at the same time, enabling as many members as possible to make unified demands for higher quality of care across the industry. The union partnered with community, faith, and nonprofit advocacy organizations under the umbrella of Recovery For All to formulate common good demands that center racial and gender justice and expand the scope of bargaining beyond wages, benefits, and working conditions. Finally, members of SEIU 1199 New England were unafraid to go on offense—threatening strikes, participating in nonviolent civil disobedience, and taking other forms of direct action that employers and lawmakers could not ignore.
The gains achieved through this strategy have proven historic. Members who work in private-sector long-term care facilities secured a living wage plus new measures to build racial equity at the workplace. Meanwhile, members employed in public-sector state agencies worked with allies in Recovery For All to demand the protection and expansion of state healthcare services in underserved communities. Under the banner “Expand Services to Save Lives,” they have started to notch victories, like winning more comprehensive mobile crisis services in communities of color in order to guarantee that trained health care professionals, and not police officers, respond to mental health emergencies. The fight that SEIU 1199 New England has led for expanded investment in the state’s health care infrastructure across the public and private sectors is directly linked to Recovery For All’s broader program and strategy—demonstrating how Bargaining for the Common Good can elevate efforts to enact progressive public policy at the state level.
The Promise of Statewide Coalitions
Although Recovery For All has existed for little more than a year and a half, we already have a series of impressive wins. In addition to investment in the health care sector, the coalition has helped win pandemic pay for essential workers; more aid to municipalities and nonprofits; increased funding for public education in preK-12 schools, colleges, and universities; and the extension of public healthcare to cover undocumented children. On the revenue side of the budget equation, the coalition has helped to win policies that support working families, such as a new state-level child tax credit and an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, as well as changes that make the tax structure more transparent. And earlier this year, Recovery For All was pivotal to winning a reform requiring the governor justify future budget proposals based on how they will mitigate racial, economic, and gender disparities.
The story in Connecticut offers one example of statewide coalitions that have recently blossomed across the country to combat extreme inequalities. Last year, the Invest in Our New York coalition won a budget requiring ultra-wealthy residents and corporations to contribute more to fund the common good, a breakthrough that raised more than $4 billion in new revenue to support public schools, rental assistance, and more. Meanwhile, the Raise Up Massachusetts coalition is hoping to win a ballot proposition that will create a millionaire’s tax to fund public education and public transportation. This work is not confined to the Northeast; similar coalitions are emerging everywhere from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest.
These efforts bode a promising future for statewide coalitions in the years to come—particularly coalitions anchored by unions committed to Bargaining for the Common Good. Today, we face a crisis that threatens to exacerbate our country’s morally unconscionable inequalities. Yet, in every crisis lies the opportunity for collective resistance. By forging labor, community, faith, and nonprofit advocacy organizations into a whole greater than the sum of its parts, statewide coalitions like Recovery For All offer a roadmap to winning racial, economic, and gender justice for our struggling communities.
Rob Baril has been president of District 1199 NE/SEIU since January 2019. Previously, Rob served as Organizing Director for a decade helping organize over 10,000 workers from nursing homes, group homes, and home care into 1199. He led contract fights for fair wages and benefits, campaigns that secured state funding to raise wages and improve access to benefits like affordable healthcare, training funds, and defined benefit pension plans.
Puya Gerami is the director of Recovery For All and a PhD candidate in history at Yale. ...Read More
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Ukraine: UN General Assembly Demands Russia
Reverse Course On ‘Attempted Illegal Annexation’
UN Peace and Security Report
12 October 2022
The UN General Assembly passed a resolution by a large majority on Wednesday, calling on countries not to recognize the four regions of Ukraine which Russia has claimed, following so-called referendums held late last month, and demanding that Moscow reverse course on its "attempted illegal annexation".
The results were 143 Member States in favor, with five voting against, and 35 abstentions. The countries who voted against were Belarus, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Nicaragua, Russia, and Syria.
A majority of those countries abstaining were African nations, alongside China and India.
The resolution “defending the principles” of the UN Charter, notes that the regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia are temporarily occupied by Russia as a result of aggression, violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty, and political independence.
The General Assembly automatically took up the resolution for debate, triggered by Russia’s use of the veto in the Security Council over it’s attempted annexation.
Immediate reversal
The resolution now passed in the Assembly, calls on all States, the UN, and international organizations not to recognize any of Russia’s annexation claims and demands the immediate reversal of its annexation declaration.
The resolution welcomes and “expresses its strong support” for the continued efforts by the Secretary-General and Member States, to de-escalate the current situation in search of peace through dialogue, negotiation, and mediation.
The debate over the Ukrainian resolution began on Monday, with the General Assembly President Csaba Korösi telling the world’s most representative deliberative body that the UN Charter, the Secretary-General, and the Assembly itself had been clear – Russia’s invasion, and attempted annexation of Ukrainian territory by force, “is illegal”.
Civilian areas bombarded
Since Monday morning, Russia has launched dozens of missiles targeting civilian areas of multiple Ukrainian cities, leading to dozens of deaths and injuries, in retaliation for the bombing of Russia’s bridge to Crimea on Saturday. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the assault was “another unacceptable escalation” in Russia’s February 24 invasion of its neighbor.
Speaking at the start of the debate on Monday, Mr. Korösi said that “when it becomes a daily routine to watch images of destroyed cities and scattered bodies, we lose our humanity…We must find a political solution based on the UN Charter and the international law.”
Secret ballot rejected
The debate began with a procedural vote on a measure which Russia had flagged, proposing that the Ukrainian draft resolution being debated, be voted on by secret ballot, not through an open recorded vote.
The Albanian proposal received 107 votes in favor, with 13 against, and 39 abstentions, with the country’s representative arguing that it would establish a “dangerous precedent” if such a substantive issue of peace and security was voted on in secret. ...Read More
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New Journals and Books for Radical Education...
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Dialogue & Initiative 2022
Contested Terrains:
Elections, War
& Peace, Labor
Edited by CCDS D&I
Editorial Group
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project
228 pages, $10 (discounts available for quantity orders from [email protected]), or order at :
This annual journal is a selection of essays offering keen insight into electoral politics on the left, vital issues for the peace and justice movements, and labor campaigns.
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Social Justice Unionism
25 Years of Theory and Practice
By Liberation Road
This new 222-page book is a collection of articles and essays covering 25 years of organizing in factories and communities by Liberation Road members and allies.
It serves as a vital handbook for a new generation of union organizers on the left looking for practical approaches to connect their work with a wider socialist vision.
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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.
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NOT TO BE MISSED: Short Links To Longer Reads...
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Photo: Ukrainian soldiers ride on an armoured vehicle near the recently retaken town of Lyman in Donetsk region on October 6, 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP)
On Disagreements Between Left Comrades Over the War in Ukraine
Here is a letter written as a courteous yet hopefully instructive reply to criticism by Anthony Barnett.
By Yanis Varoufakis
Common Dreams
Oct12, 2022 - Anthony Burnett, a friend, comrade and collaborator, just published an article in openDemocracy, a splendid and much loved source of progressive ideas and material, to which he alerted me in a mail reading:
“Dear Yanis, we disagree but in solidarity!” Since Anthony’s article mentions me, along with Jeremy Corbyn, in its subtitle, here I am, responding in the spirit of solidarity, affection and goodwill.
Anthony’s article was in response to a petition I gladly co-signed that, in the face of a New Cold War and a collapsing climate, called for an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, for the aversion of another war over Taiwan, for the de-escalation of the New Cold War engulfing, primarily, the United States and China and, lastly, for a genuine global Green New Deal.
That petition, it is perhaps helpful to note, was in the spirit of The Athens Declaration which I, Jeremy Corbyn and Ece Temelkuran issued on 13th May 2022 on behalf of DiEM25 and the Progressive International.
* * *
Dear Anthony,
Whenever you and I debate anything, the hardest part is to disentangle the things we agree on from our genuine differences. So, let me begin by pointing out four of your points with which I agree before homing in on our one major disagreement:
“Any threat to use nuclear weapons is an outrage”.
Obviously. Whether it is a panicky Putin who issues such threats, or North Korea, or the United States perpetually refusing to rule out a first strike, we must condemn every nuclear threat and any attempt to normalize nuclear weapon use.
“Invading other countries is wrong… it is wrong for Israel in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza, and it must now be reversed in Ukraine.”
Absolutely. This is how I put the same point on 5th March in an article entitled What we must do in the face of Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine: “When a country or region is invaded, I am overcome by one duty: To take the side of the people facing troops with direct orders to violate their homes, to bombard their neighborhoods, to destroy the circumstances of their lives. Without hesitation. Unconditionally.”
“If [Ukrainian] neutrality were guaranteed by military commitments from outside to safeguard the country’s independence in a way that satisfied the government in Kyiv, and did not deprive it of weapons for self-defence, then this would be reasonable.”
Agreed. Here is the same idea as I put it in my aforementioned 5th March article: “[I]t must be an agreement guaranteed jointly by Washington and Moscow, guaranteeing an independent and neutral Ukraine as part of a broader agreement that de-escalates tensions with the Baltics, Poland, around the Black Sea, across Europe.”
“Neutrality should not prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union if it so chooses (something even Putin’s Russia seems to have accepted). This, too, needs to be said.”
This is also my position. From the first moment Putin invaded Ukraine, I have been arguing that to stand with Ukraine should mean, amongst other things, a commitment to empowering Ukrainians to integrate, if this is what they want, with Western Europe in the same way that Austria did during the Cold War: militarily neutral but with a boisterous democracy, strong economy, full political independence, and freedom “to truck, barter and exchange” with anyone they want.
You warn leftists, like myself, of the danger that, while discussing Ukraine and the manner in which Russia, the USA and NATO are exploiting the war, we should avoid denying “Ukrainian agency and the commitment of a huge majority of Ukrainians to their country’s integrity and independence.”
How can I disagree? As a Greek, I have had a gutful of Anglo-European orientalist, weaponized condescension that sought to explain to us Greeks our predicament – with a view to getting us to accept our ‘lot’. However, this is not an argument – as I am sure you agree – that we Greeks have never been manipulated by the Great Powers or, indeed, that non-Greeks like your good self should not have an opinion on Greek politics; including your right to tell me that I am wrong on Greek matters or even that I have been led astray. Maintaining the right balance between (A) respecting the agency of those in the eye of some distant storm and (B) defending our right, as internationalists, to treat another nation’s war or crisis as our own, is both hard and crucial – as I tried to explain in another article back in March entitled Westsplainers? Or genuine comrades? ...Read More
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What If Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons In Ukraine?
A look at the grim scenarios—and the U.S. playbook for each
By Eric Schlosser
The Atlantic
June 21, 2022 - The 12th main directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense operates a dozen central storage facilities for nuclear weapons. Known as “Object S” sites and scattered across the Russian Federation, they contain thousands of nuclear warheads and hydrogen bombs with a wide variety of explosive yields.
For the past three months, President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have been ominously threatening to use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine. According to Pavel Podvig, the director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project and a former research fellow at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, now based in Geneva, the long-range ballistic missiles deployed on land and on submarines are Russia’s only nuclear weapons available for immediate use. If Putin decides to attack Ukraine with shorter-range, “tactical” nuclear weapons, they will have to be removed from an Object S site—such as Belgorod-22, just 25 miles from the Ukrainian border—and transported to military bases. It will take hours for the weapons to be made combat-ready, for warheads to be mated with cruise missiles or ballistic missiles, for hydrogen bombs to be loaded on planes.
The United States will most likely observe the movement of these weapons in real time: by means of satellite surveillance, cameras hidden beside the road, local agents with binoculars. And that will raise a question of existential importance: What should the United States do?
President Joe Biden has made clear that any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences.” But his administration has remained publicly ambiguous about what those consequences would be. That ambiguity is the correct policy. Nevertheless, there must also be open discussion and debate outside the administration about what is really at stake.
During the past month, I’ve spoken with many national-security experts and former government officials about the likelihood of Russia using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the probable targets, and the proper American response. Although they disagreed on some issues, I heard the same point again and again: The risk of nuclear war is greater today than at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis. And the decisions that would have to be made after a Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine are unprecedented.
In 1945, when the United States destroyed two Japanese cities with atomic bombs, it was the world’s sole nuclear power. Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, others may soon obtain them, and the potential for things going terribly wrong has vastly increased.
Several scenarios for how Russia might soon use a nuclear weapon seem possible:
(1) a detonation over the Black Sea, causing no casualties but demonstrating a resolve to cross the nuclear threshold and signaling that worse may come,
(2) a decapitation strike against the Ukrainian leadership, attempting to kill President Volodymyr Zelensky and his advisers in their underground bunkers,
(3) a nuclear assault on a Ukrainian military target, perhaps an air base or a supply depot, that is not intended to harm civilians, and
(4) the destruction of a Ukrainian city, causing mass civilian casualties and creating terror to precipitate a swift surrender—the same aims that motivated the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Any response by the Biden administration would be based not only on how Russia uses a nuclear weapon against Ukraine but also, more important, on how Russia’s future behavior might be affected by the American response. Would it encourage Putin to back down—or to double down? Cold War debates about nuclear strategy focused on ways to anticipate and manage the escalation of a conflict. During the early 1960s, Herman Kahn, a prominent strategist at the Rand Corporation and the Hudson Institute, came up with a visual metaphor for the problem: “the escalation ladder.” Kahn was one of the primary inspirations for the character Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film, and yet the escalation ladder remains a central concept in thinking about how to fight a nuclear war. Kahn’s version of the ladder had 44 steps. At the bottom was an absence of hostilities; at the top was nuclear annihilation. A president might choose to escalate from step No. 26, “Demonstration Attack on Zone of Interior,” to step No. 39, “Slow-Motion Countercity War.” The goal of each new step upward might vary. It might simply be to send a message. Or it could be to coerce, control, or devastate an adversary. You climbed the ladder to reach the bottom again someday.
The “escalation vortex” is a more recent and more complex visualization of a potential conflict between nuclear states. ...Read More
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Michael Flynn Is Recruiting An ‘Army Of God’ In Growing Christian Nationalist Movement
Politics
By Michelle R. Smith
& Richard Lardner
Associated Press
Oct 7, 2022 - BATAVIA, N.Y. (AP) — By the time the red, white and blue-colored microphone had been switched off, the crowd of 3,000 had listened to hours of invective and grievance.
“We’re under warfare,” one speaker told them. Another said she would “take a bullet for my nation,” while a third insisted, “They hate you because they hate Jesus.” Attendees were told now is the time to “put on the whole armor of God.” Then retired three-star Army general Michael Flynn, the tour’s biggest draw, invited people to be baptized.
Scores of people walked out of the speakers’ tent to three large metal tubs filled with water. While praise music played in the background, one conference-goer after another stepped in. Pastors then lowered them under the surface, welcoming them into their movement in the name of Jesus Christ. One woman wore a T-shirt that read “Army of God.”
Flynn warned the crowd that they were in the midst of a “spiritual war” and a “political war” and urged people to get involved.
ReAwaken America was launched by Flynn, a former White House national security adviser, and Oklahoma entrepreneur Clay Clark a few months after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol failed to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Attendees and speakers still insist — against all evidence and dozens of court rulings — that Donald Trump rightfully won.
Since early last year, the ReAwaken America Tour has carried its message of a country under siege to tens of thousands of people in 15 cities and towns. The tour serves as a traveling roadshow and recruiting tool for an ascendant Christian nationalist movement that’s wrapped itself in God, patriotism and politics and has grown in power and influence inside the Republican Party.
In the version of America laid out at the ReAwaken tour, Christianity should be at the center of American life and institutions. Instead, it’s under attack, and attendees need to fight to restore the nation’s Christian roots. It’s a message repeated over and over at ReAwaken — one that upends the constitutional ideal of a pluralist democracy. But it’s a message that is taking hold.
A poll by the University of Maryland conducted in May found that 61% of Republicans support declaring the U.S. to be a Christian nation.
“Christian nationalism, really undermines and attacks foundational values in American democracy. And that is a promise of religious freedoms for all,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee, which advocates for religious freedom.
She said the ReAwaken cause is “a partisan political cause, and the cause here is to spread misinformation, to perpetuate the big lie and to have a different result next time in the next election.”
___
This story is part of an ongoing investigation from The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” that includes the upcoming documentary “Michael Flynn’s Holy War,” premiering Oct. 18 on PBS and online.
ReAwaken acts as a petri dish for Christian nationalism and pushes the idea that there’s a battle underway between good and evil forces. Those who are considered evil include government officials and Democrats.
It’s “a pep rally on spiritual steroids” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University in Michigan, who studies evangelicalism.
ReAwaken often appears in churches with speakers addressing attendees from the pulpit. The Batavia show was staged on the grounds of a church, after faith and community leaders in nearby Rochester told organizers they weren’t welcome.
Inside a revival tent set up outside, people sat in white folding chairs packed so tightly the rows between were nearly impassable. From the stage, speakers stirred up fear and hatred. Immigrants are rushing over the border “to take your place,” one said. Homosexuals and pedophiles are classified in the same category: sinful people who don’t honor God. Life-saving vaccines are creating “a damn genocide.”
“The enemy wants to muzzle you,” another speaker warned. “He wants to shut your mouth.”
Clark, the Tour’s principal organizer and emcee, opened the Batavia show bellowing: “Good morning, New York! And good morning, New York Attorney General Letitia James!” The greeting was a reference to a letter James’ sent to Flynn and Clark warning them against violent or unlawful conduct.
“I want you to look around and you’ll see a group of people that love this country dearly,” he said. “At this Reawaken America Tour, Jesus is King (and) President Donald J. Trump is our president.” ...Read More
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From the CCDS Socialist Education Project...
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![](https://imgssl.constantcontact.com/letters/images/sys/S.gif) |
A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project and Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity orders from [email protected]), 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.
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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 :
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Today: The Criminal Case Against Trump
The final hearing of the January 6 committee lays the foundation
By Robert Reich
Oct 13, 2022 - Today’s final hearing of the January 6 committee is a segue to the criminal case that federal prosecutors are piecing together, bolstered by the recent issuance of dozens of grand jury subpoenas and court-authorized searches of some of Donald Trump’s top allies.
The committee voted unanimously to subpoena Trump to answer questions before the committee under oath. Elizabeth Cheney, committee vice-chairman, said “he must be accountable. He is required to answer for his actions.” But subpoenaing Trump seems largely a symbolic gesture — unless Trump decides he wants to present “his side” to the American people and is prepared to lie up the wazoo, regardless of legal consequences. Although the legal issues involved in subpoenaing a former president may pass legal muster, the length of time it would take to litigate the issue will all but certainly carry on beyond the select committee’s tenure, which ends in January.
Today’s hearing provided the final piece of the puzzle for making a criminal case against Trump: his state of his mind -- what he knew and intended in committing at least two federal crimes: 18 U.S.C. 371, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and 18 U.S.C. 1512, obstruction of Congress. The issue of criminal intent will be central to any criminal trial.
Today’s hearing comes 27 days before a critical midterm election in which most Republican candidates deny that Biden won the 2020 presidential election — not because of any credible evidence but solely because Trump has continued to make the baseless claim that he won, and has convinced almost two-thirds of Republican voters of that Big Lie.
Recap of the first seven hearings: Today’s hearing recapped much of the first seven hearings, including:
— An Oval Office meeting on December 18, where Trump had to choose between what Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien called “Team Normal” and what some Trump advisers called “Team Crazy.” In that “unhinged” meeting, “Team Crazy,” including Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, produced a draft executive order they had prepared where they proposed that the U.S. military seize state election machines. “Team Normal” opposed the plan.
— On December 19, just hours after the draft Executive Order was rejected and the hours-long meeting ended, Trump sent his “will be wild” tweet. The evidence presented made clear that the far-right militia and other figures understood that tweet as a call to violence.
— Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, both of whom Trump had pardoned during the time between the election and January 6, had direct relationships with violent right-wing groups. One rally organizer explained that Trump wanted to surround himself with such people because they were “very very vicious in publicly defending him.”
— Trump endangered the safety of Vice President Pence and his family on January 6 by tweeting criticism of Pence, which unleashed the mob to go after Pence, chanting “hang Mike Pence.” Trump watched the riots unfold on television for hours without lifting a finger to protect the Vice President, his family, or Members of Congress, despite pleas from Trump family members, White House advisors, and Republican congressional leaders.
— Trump sought to name a Justice Department minion as the new Attorney General who then planned to send letters to Trump-friendly state legislatures alleging widespread fraud in their states – without a shred of evidence. The proposed letters would urge these friendly state legislatures to exploit the “failed choice” loophole in antiquated 19th-century laws and substitute their own Trump presidential electors for the Biden electors that had been chosen by the voters on Election Day. Trump’s own top Justice Department officials killed this scheme to steal the presidency.
Today’s hearing: Today’s final hearing also presented damning new evidence about Trump’s state of mind. As committee vice-chair Liz Cheney stated: “Today we will focus on his state of mind. Trump had a premeditated plan to claim the election was stolen before Election Day. Trump was better informed about the absence of widespread election fraud than almost any American.”
The committee then showed evidence that:
1. Trump concocted his plan long before Election Day. Knowing that mail-in votes would be more likely cast for Biden and would not be counted until possibly days after Trump had taken the lead on Election Day, Trump planned to give a false election victory speech on the evening of Election Day. Even though the networks were starting to call the race for Biden, Trump declared victory and demanded that voting counts stop. “This is a fraud on the American public, an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election, we did win this election.”
2. Trump knew he lost. He also knew that there was no evidence of fraud or irregularities sufficient to change the outcome. In none of 62 court cases was he able to establish election fraud. His Attorney General told him there had been no fraud. His advisors repeatedly told him there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome. The Supreme Court rejected his case on December 11. Electors voted on December 14. His senior staff advised him to concede. Nonetheless, Trump’s intended to ignore the rule of law to stay in power.
3. Trump was personally and directly involved in a plan to remain in power, regardless.
(1) He knew he was lying when he told the public that Dominion Voting machines were rigged against him, when he told the public there were more votes than voters, and when he told the public about a “vote dump” in Detroit. He purposely and maliciously repeated these lies to the public over and over again.
(2) He knew his allegations of fraud in Georgia were false. But he nonetheless sought to pressure the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger into giving him the votes he needed, saying “I want to find 11,780 votes.” When the secretary of state demurred, Trump threatened that he’d be prosecuted.
(3) He also tried to pressure election officials in Arizona and Michigan, knowing he lost those states.
(4) Knowing he lost the election, he also pressured the Justice Department to change the results of the election until Justice Department officials threatened mass resignation.
(5) He sought to replace real Biden electors with fake Trump electors on January 6. He knew this was illegal.
(6) He tried to get Vice President Pence to unilaterally disregard the electoral count. Trump knew this was illegal.
(7) He intentionally summoned his supporters to the Capitol, and then, knowing they were armed, intended that they march to the Capitol.
(8) Even before his Ellipse speech, he knew there would be violence. He knew people coming to Washington planned to attack the Capitol and that multiple users online were targeting members of Congress. The Secret Service had this information at least 10 days before the attack. On January 6, during his speech on the Ellipse, Trump knew the crowd was armed and dangerous.
Even when Trump knew about the violence unfolding at the Capitol on January 6, he refused to call off the mob.
Next steps?
This is probably the last of the committee’s hearings. If Republicans succeed in their drive to win the House majority (which seems likely), they will almost certainly disband the committee in January and shut down any official accounting by Congress for the largest attack on the Capitol in centuries.
This means the panel has less than three months to finish up its investigation, write and release its final report (likely in December), make any legislative recommendations, and decide whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
The January 6 committee, led by Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY), has done America a great service — giving the nation exactly what it has most needed: an accounting of what occurred January 6, why it occurred, and Trump’s role in it.
Whether this will lead to Trump being held criminally accountable does not depend on the committee making a criminal referral. Regardless of whether it makes such a referral, that decision is solely up to the U.S. Attorney General, Merrick Garland (who would now be sitting on the Supreme Court had it not been for Mitch McConnell and a Republican Senate majority).
But the committee’s work — its investigation and its public hearings — have played a part in persuading Garland to move forward with a criminal case against Trump. If you’d asked me six months ago, I’d have said Garland would not do so, for fear of dividing the nation even more deeply. Now, I believe he will. ...Read More
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The Election-Swinging, Facebook-Fueled, Get-Out-the-Vote Machine
Former Democratic operative Tara McGowan is sinking millions into Meta’s ad network to build Courier Newsroom, a media powerhouse for the left.
By Nancy Scola
Wired Backchannel
OCT 6, 2022 - IT WAS A sunny June afternoon in Washington, DC, and even though Tara McGowan professes to hate this city, she was having fun.
A political operative turned publisher, she sat in a conference room in a WeWork office downtown, her fingertips loudly drumming away on the bright orange table. The energetic 36-year-old is the CEO of a company called Good Information, where she oversees a mini empire of progressive local news sites across the United States.
Beaming in on a big videoscreen was Pat Rynard, himself a Democratic operative turned journalist and founder of a small political website called Iowa Starting Line, which The New York Times once declared “the ‘It’ read for political insiders.” McGowan had bought the site from him in 2021, making it the eighth in her growing collection of two- to six-person newsrooms stretching from Arizona to North Carolina.
McGowan believes these outlets are the antidote to bad information—the hyperbole and lies that proliferate in Americans’ social media feeds and promote ideas mostly from the ideological right. Through the calculated injection of news stories into these feeds, McGowan thinks she can claw a crumbling republic back from the brink and—this is the important part—get more people to vote. She’s confident these new recruits to the democratic process will lean decidedly left.
Rynard walked her through an experiment in using Facebook’s powerful ad-targeting tools. Iowa’s primary elections were taking place the next day, and he wanted to know whether a handful of Iowa Starting Line’s stories could shape the results. Primaries are the sort of political contest that both keep democracy afloat and tend to be roundly ignored.
“Remind me when the actual boosting of the coverage started?” asked McGowan, sipping from a giant pink water bottle.
“Three weeks ago,” Rynard replied. Working with a political data shop, McGowan’s team had gotten a list of residents in blue-collar counties in the state’s east. They cut the hardcore Republicans from the list, then dumped the remaining names into Facebook’s ad-buying portal. An analyst used the app’s “lookalike” tool to find other people like them, then bought ads that would appear in those users’ newsfeeds. The ads weren’t selling anything; they were just promoting a few stories from Rynard’s site—straight reporting on Democratic candidates vying to run against sitting US senator Chuck Grassley, an infographic of voting deadlines. So far, Rynard was pleased. One ad he’d tossed in on a whim, which riffed on a story titled “Iowa Passed 70 New Laws This Year. Here’s What They Do,” was clicked on by 3.5 percent of the people who saw it. (Digital ads work on painfully small margins; anything above 2 percent is reason to cheer.)
But the experiment was not about clickthrough rates or reading—it was about whether any of those people would actually show up to vote. After the primary, McGowan’s analysts dug into the data. The Facebook ads had cost them $49,000, which, it turned out, was about what the Democratic winner had spent on the platform. The analysts compared the batch of targeted Iowans with the publicly available list of people who voted. They came back with what they saw as a solid win. About 3,300 more of the targeted residents had turned out to vote than had been forecast to. The ads, they concluded, had worked, and at a reasonable $15 per vote. That’s about what Biden had spent nationally in 2020 while defeating Trump, though he spent more per voter in swing states.
To McGowan, the results validated years of work. She is a longtime proponent of circulating news through ad platforms to shape political thinking. Last election cycle, this “boosted news” technique, along with a suite of data-driven practices and huge sums of fundraised money, helped make her a high-profile if controversial figure in Democratic politics. Now, she says, she has left that world behind for journalism—but brought her political toolbox with her.
In its three years of existence, McGowan’s army of sites—collectively called Courier Newsroom—has spent at least $5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads alone. Backed by billionaire LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, liberal philanthropist George Soros, and others, McGowan says she raised $15 million in the first half of this year—and she’s gunning for more.
McGowan’s critics hate what she’s up to. As Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the right-leaning nonprofit Americans for Public Trust, puts it, trying to mobilize voters is “just not something newsrooms do.”
McGowan doesn’t disagree. She says that’s precisely the problem. Her argument goes like this: Too many newsrooms have lost their way by catering to elite readers and resorting to paywalls. (A rarity a decade ago, now about three-quarters of US newspapers have them.) Meanwhile, more than 2,000 newspapers across the country have closed since 2004, leaving scores of Americans without the sort of trusted information that might propel them to the polls. Instead, about 80 million people who could have voted in the high-stakes election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden didn’t. To her, it’s self-evident that the journalism world should use every possible tactic to nudge reluctant voters to the ballot box. That idea, though, is breaking the minds of some of journalism’s purists, who worry it could backfire—shattering what remains of the public’s trust in the press.
ON MCGOWAN’S LEFT arm is a tattoo, in all caps, of the words “Yes We Can.” She’d asked former president Barack Obama to write his campaign slogan on her skin, then told him mid-scribble of her plan to ink it; the “Can” is noticeably neater. A journalism and political science double major, she had worked for Obama as a digital producer on his 2012 reelection campaign and parlayed that experience into a series of jobs in politics, including as the digital director for NextGen America, the climate change organization founded by billionaire Tom Steyer, and as director of digital strategy for Priorities USA Action, the massive pro-Hillary political action committee.
McGowan built a reputation as a digital expert willing to try new things. She and many others thought the left had grown dangerously complacent since Obama’s internet-powered victory in 2008. After Trump’s upset in 2016, she started an organization called Acronym, which was largely geared toward making sure he and others like him wouldn’t win again. The group came to focus on digital advertising tools and was known for aggressively testing exactly which ads worked and sharing the results with others on the left.
But as McGowan tells it, she hated the churn-and-burn of this work—perpetually raising cash to pour into last-ditch online ads meant to pick off a few persuadable voters. She wanted to create something more lasting. Four years ago, she coauthored a report with Eli Pariser, a progressive organizer best known for his 2011 book The Filter Bubble, which argued that the algorithm-driven internet was trapping Americans in ideological echo chambers. McGowan and Pariser’s report took the position that Democrats were quickly losing power in the United States because they’d neglected to figure out how to navigate that changing landscape. Progressives had opted for bursty spending on TV ads over the right’s investment in “always-on, more digitally fluent media infrastructure.”
McGowan wanted to build that kind of infrastructure. She raised a bit of money to build a pilot demonstration in Virginia, where Democrats had a shot at retaking the legislature. Called Dogwood, after both the state flower and tree, it would be aimed at women living in the suburbs and beyond, a constituency that can swing elections there.
The site started pumping out a mix of politics and lifestyle coverage, very much in the vein of a pre-internet local newspaper. Right away McGowan and her team had to contend with what researchers call Americans’ increasing “news avoidance”—they don’t like to read the news, and they especially don’t like to read about politics.
“Our audiences are not being reached by factual news information,” McGowan tells me when we meet up at DC’s Generator Hotel on one of her visits from her Rhode Island home. It’s imperative, she argues, to chase people wherever they are online. She opened her brown eyes wide and spoke uncharacteristically slowly to make sure I got it: “If we don’t target them, they won’t see it.”
Critics howled about a PAC masquerading as a journalistic outfit. McGowan was undeterred. She secured more money and launched sites tailored to unlikely voters in other political hot spots: Arizona’s The Copper Courier, for Latinas and Indigenous women in Maricopa County; North Carolina’s Cardinal & Pine, for rural communities of color; and Florida’s Floricua, for Puerto Rican women.
The Courier newsrooms rolled along until the winter of 2020. By then Acronym had grown into a massive organization; one offshoot was a campaign tech shop called Shadow, which had won a contract to build an app that could report the Democratic Party’s caucus results. But at the critical moment, it failed, which—when coupled with data errors unrelated to Shadow’s work—delayed results for three days. McGowan took enormous heat in the press and from liberal circles, which she believes was unfair: For one thing, she wasn’t Shadow’s CEO.
McGowan found few defenders in professional Democratic networks, deepening her dislike of DC as an immensely backstabby place. When stories popped up claiming she was trying to throw the caucuses for Pete Buttigieg, for whom her husband worked, she felt she got a lesson in how quickly bad information spreads.
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But McGowan says even she knew she needed to focus. She recalls Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe, then on Acronym’s board and a powerful fundraiser, telling her to learn from Republicans: Nothing of lasting significance had ever been built from inside that party’s establishment. She raised a bit of new money and left Acronym, taking Courier Newsroom with her.
FRESHLY HUMBLED, MCGOWAN set about rebooting Courier. She came to accept the notion that you can’t be a trusted news organization while being secretive about your donors, and she dug into cleaning up its reputation.
She was in the middle of a long-running fight with a company called NewsGuard. Started in 2018 in part by well-known journalist and Court TV founder Steven Brill, NewsGuard existed to fight the country’s growing misinformation problem with human editorial judgment. The company evaluated online content shops and awarded them red or green ratings. As Brill put it at the time, NewsGuard would take on “a growing scourge that clearly cannot be solved by algorithms.”
At NewsGuard’s launch, Brill’s cofounder had said that their aim was to “tell readers The Denver Post is a real newspaper and that the Denver Guardian exists only as a purveyor of fake news.” It’s a tough job: While The Denver Post might be a local institution now, it was founded in 1892 as a Democratic organ. To apply a measure of science to that messiness, NewsGuard scores sites on nine criteria. Early on, Courier earned only a 57 out of 100. “This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards,” concluded NewsGuard’s evaluators.
They objected to just about everything: Courier’s way of gathering and presenting information, its handling of the difference between news and opinion, and the inadequacy of its disclosures of who owns it, how it’s financed, who’s in charge, and what its conflicts of interest might be. They slapped the sites with a red rating. Meanwhile, some prominent, proudly right-wing sites fare better: The Daily Wire, for example, cofounded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, scores a 69.5 and a green rating. When I pressed Brill on what made Courier less legit, he replied that The Daily Wire is “fairly explicit about what they do and don’t do.”
McGowan wanted another shot. In January 2021, she and Brill joined a Zoom call to hash it all out. According to McGowan, the meeting devolved into “a screaming fight.” Brill recalls that McGowan was “condescending, patronizing,” and “self-righteous,” all while engaging in doublespeak. “She talked about how her life’s work is rebuilding trust in institutions,” Brill says, “when her life’s work is undermining trust in what I consider to be the most cherished institution we have, which is the press.”
He’s not alone in that view. When I refer to Courier as a news organization in a conversation with Peter Adams, an executive at the nonprofit News Literacy Project, he quickly cautions me against it. His organization, he says, “is pretty careful with the way we use the word news,” reserving it for those who “strive to be as fair and accurate and transparent as possible.” Courier, Adams said, has only “posed” as such. He and Brill continue to object to McGowan’s political roots.
Emily Bell, the founding director of Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, is less damning of Courier, at least for now. She oversees studies of “pink slime”—purely partisan outlets masquerading as local news shops. Courier isn’t that, Bell says. But she’s unconvinced it’s truly independent. “It’s too early to tell,” she says. “We’re in a period of intense change” regarding “how we target stories and how people receive, share, and discuss news.”
In the fall of 2021, McGowan was having breakfast in Lower Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel with an NYU journalism professor named Jay Rosen. McGowan wanted the journalism world to take her seriously, and Rosen seemed like a potential ally. He was known for his argument that the news-business norm of the “view from nowhere”—the pretense that journalists operate with no bias or even lived experience—doesn’t serve the public. He came to breakfast skeptical of Courier. But he’d been incubating an idea for a new sort of transparency device: a statement of beliefs that would articulate a news organization’s actual agenda. He hoped it might help revive the public’s trust in the media. Says Rosen, “I wanted to see: How hard is this going to be in practice?”
Over the course of that autumn, Rosen worked with Courier’s newsrooms to write up manifestos of sorts detailing what each stood for. One newsroom came out in support of workers’ rights; another stood up for abortion access. The statements are varying degrees of explicit, but all try to flesh out what their liberalism means in practice.
Posted on each newsroom’s website, the statements aren’t likely to make their way to many readers, few of whom can be expected to click on the sites’ About pages. But the statements are there, and McGowan reasonably argues that their mission articulation—plus disclosures about Courier’s funding—go beyond what many news organizations do. With the statements in place, one of her staffers fired off an email to NewsGuard.
But Brill was unmoved. Courier’s red rating would stay for now. “It’s ridiculous,” McGowan says. She decided to move on.
McGowan, in a white jacket, runs a Courier leadership team meeting at a WeWork in DC.
SHE HAD TO build an audience fast if she wanted Courier’s newsrooms to make a mark on the 2022 midterm elections. One obstacle was that Democrats lack some of the right’s obvious cultural signifiers—being pro-hunting, churchgoing, antiabortion. (Opposing them has not proven all that galvanizing.) So her editors rely heavily on sense of place. “How do you build bridges with people who don’t care about politics? Identity. The right uses cultural identity,” McGowan says. She could do the same. “What is unifying? Sports teams. State pride.”
Her editors learned quickly that they got the most subscribers from local, cultural coverage—not straight politics—so the sites crank out lifestyle stories: the best places to spot rare birds, a ranking of Iowa’s best gas-station breakfast pizzas, a profile of the Black-owned barbecue spot in a tiny North Carolina town that became the only place to eat after a hurricane hit. After pouring money into making videos for TikTok, McGowan was pleased to see Courier find some traction there: In August alone, Iowa Starting Line’s videos racked up 2 million views. When the time is right, Courier slips in a politics story, such as one on the Republican politicians who voted against funding meant to address the baby formula shortage.
What Courier stories don’t really include, though, is partisan red meat. Sometimes they explicitly emphasize progressive values, as in an interview in Michigan’s The ’Gander in which faith leaders discuss how abortion access is part of their religious traditions. It’s an attempt, the site’s Grand Rapids–based editor says, to counteract the “Michigan nice” quality of women in the state that leads them to avoid tough political conversations. It’s also, less obviously, a challenge to the idea that abortion is widely controversial, when public opinion polls show that more than half of Americans support it being broadly legal.
Such sly liberalism is by design. James Barnes, Acronym’s former measurement czar, joined the organization in 2019 to swing voters away from Trump, having previously embedded with the Trump campaign as a Facebook employee. Barnes remains one of McGowan’s confidants, and he says a takeaway from his experience is that you don’t have to hammer an audience with talking points: “People who are more informed about what’s going on are more skeptical, harder to convince of nonsense.”
Still, getting them to vote takes an extra step. People also need to believe that engaging in politics does them some good, says Leticia Bode, a Georgetown professor and expert on political communication. A withered sense of political efficacy is a sign of an unhealthy civil society. And at last check, almost half of all Americans say there’s not much ordinary citizens can do to influence how the government runs.
That’s why, barreling toward the US’s midterm elections, Courier is pumping out stories to counter that fatalism. The Copper Courier wrote about how Latino voters in Arizona had helped Biden become the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton. Cardinal & Pine showed how, in a “rare bit of bipartisanship,” North Carolina members of Congress had pushed the Treasury Department to ease restrictions on using Covid-19 funding for affordable housing. Deign to pick your elected leaders and here’s what they can do, goes the thinking. To make sure those stories reach their intended audiences, McGowan isn’t relying only on ads; she’s hiring what she calls content organizers to tap the social networks of their would-be allies—nonprofit groups, mostly—to help distribute stories as part of what they’re calling Good Info Messengers.ome to contemplate. ...Read More
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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.
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History Lesson of the Week:
The Gold Coast King Who Fought Europe’s Slave Traders
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Photo: Dancers and musicians celebrate Junkanoo in the Bahamas. © Sean Kingsley
New research reveals links between the 18th-century Ahanta leader John Canoe and the Caribbean festival Junkanoo
Every Christmas, residents of the Bahamas head outdoors, crowding the streets of Nassau in celebration of Junkanoo, the country’s national festival. Tourists and locals alike applaud dancers parading in green and gold costumes to the otherworldly beat of drums, horns and bells.
Junkanoo marches not just at Christmas, but for funerals, museum openings and even to honor the arrival of Prince William during the late British queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Junkanoo is everywhere, on stamps, coins and five-dollar bills. A local beer, Kalik, is named after the sound of the cowbells rung during the festival.
Celebrated from Jamaica to North Carolina, Junkanoo is to many just a tourist commodity. Like Mardi Gras, groups compete to win prizes for the best costumes, music and performances. Crews of up to 700 people seek sponsorships from local businesses.
Behind the commercialized holiday, though, hides an epic foundation myth that traces Junkanoo to the Ahanta people of the resource-rich Gold Coast, in what is now western Ghana, and John Canoe, a mysterious African king who took on the might of colonial Europe and won.
Junk enough and John Canoe
“The spirit of Junkanoo has been lost in translation,” says historian Christopher Davis, sitting next to archaeologist Michael Pateman on the veranda of the Cricket Club in downtown Nassau. Behind them loom the guns of Fort Charlotte, built by colonial Britain in 1787. A stone’s throw away are the alluring sands of Junkanoo Beach. Nearby, cruise ships drop off passengers to explore the shore from which Blackbeard and Anne Bonny launched raids during the golden age of piracy.
Davis, founder of the nonprofit Sankofa Flamingo Foundation, and Pateman, director of the newly opened Bahamas Maritime Museum, are on a mission to uncover the truth behind Junkanoo. The earliest written records of a “John Canoe” festival date to 1769 in the Caribbean and 1801 in the Bahamas. But the exact circumstances of the celebration’s emergence are shrouded in layers of myth and confusion.
The most common theory paints Junkanoo’s namesake, Canoe, as a faceless victim of the transatlantic slave trade—a captive trafficked to the Bahamas, where he persuaded the English to gift enslaved Africans Christmas Day off. (Canoe is often described as a former slave trader in his own right.) The enslavers misunderstood the cultural meaning of John Canoe, instead hearing “Junkanoo.” When the holiday became a disruptive bother to the English colonial government, it dubbed them “junk anew” or “junk enough.”
Davis and Pateman’s research contradicts this backstory. Based on long-overlooked written and oral histories, they tie the festival’s origins to Gold Coast hero Canoe, a warrior king of the Ahanta who was born around 1670. At a time when the slave trade and plantations in the Americas were the biggest moneymakers on earth, Canoe stood up to the Europeans exploiting his people. The scholars argue that enslaved Africans who heard about Canoe’s defiance kept his story alive upon their arrival in the Caribbean, basing their own John Canoe festivals on celebrations held in their homeland. On December 26, 1849, for instance, the Nassau Guardian reported that “several prize oxen, decked out in ribbons, were led over the town, previous to falling a sacrifice, and ‘John Canoe’ came forth on stilts in style, much to the gratification of his numerous train of followers.”
The actual Canoe allied himself with Prussia (now Germany) against the Dutch and the English, making his fortune first as chief broker of the Prussian Brandenburg African Company and then by trading gold on his own account. Crucially, Canoe controlled Cape Three Points, the only local source of fresh water.
The West feared Canoe, or Jan Kwaw as the Ahanta knew him, as a “strong-made man, about 50, of a sullen look,” who terrorized slave traders in the early 18th century with his army of 15,000 men. In January 1712, Canoe defeated Dutch forces at Elmina Castle, the largest fort on the Gold Coast; some 30,000 enslaved Africans passed through its Door of No Return each year. Later in 1712, on Christmas Day, Canoe blew up the gunpowder room in the Royal African Company’s slave trading base at Fort Metal Cross.
Formed in 1683, the Ahanta-Prussian alliance proved short-lived, with the Prussians selling their African holdings to the Dutch for 6,000 ducats on January 17, 1718. When the Dutch sent ships to pick up the keys to the former Prussian fort that April, Canoe turned them away. According to a French memorandum, he reportedly said, “If the king of Prussia was not intentioned to come and live in his fort, he was not entitled anymore to dispose of it in favor of any person, considering that he did not possess the land.” As king of the Ahanta and the owner of the soil in question, Canoe declared himself “master of the country.” ...Read More
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These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!
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Building Our Movement: Lunch-Break Lessons
WEEKLY BULLETIN OF THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY PROJECT
from the Oct , 2022 Bulletin
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I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
In these lines from her memorable poem To Be of Use, Marge Piercy captured the essence of a rank-and-file union activist. Years ago, as a hospital food-service worker, I became one of those activists. I still remember the small daily conversations that made me an organizer. One in particular: Co-worker Bessie and I were finishing our break, with just five minutes left before time to start serving lunch in the cafeteria, when a doctor came up to the counter and rapped on it to get our attention: “I’m in a hurry!”
“We better go serve him,” said I, having been raised to see doctors as only a few ranks down from the gods.
“Doctors always keep me waiting,” Bessie replied. “He can wait until we finish our break.”
Bingo, class consciousness! From an individual action to maintain our right to a full break, we would go on to organizing mass actions to expand the rights of all workers.
Long-time union activist Frank Martin del Campo has done, again and again, what has to be done to get the labor movement out of Marge Piercy’s mud. And nothing may need doing more, he reminds us in this week’s issue, than solidifying ties between US rank-and-file and Mexican rank-and-file workers.
The United Auto Workers could play a key role in that effort, and a more progressive leadership at the UAW could make all the difference in the world. A vote for the UAW’s national officers is coming up, and our México Solidarity Project has been working with UAW retirees — a huge section of the union’s voting membership — to distribute a “get-out-the-vote” letter that urges support for the progressive UAW Members United slate.
Every union supporter, whether a UAW member or not, has a stake in this election, and you can help “move things forward” by “forwarding” our letter through your networks! This link to our letter also allows retirees to sign on to México Solidarity Project updates. Thanks! ...Read More
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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.
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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.
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Video for Learning: The Churchill cult is out of control: Tariq Ali on Winston Churchill 27min
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Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical'
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This week's topic:
Click the picture to access the blog.
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Tune of the Week: Rod Stewart - Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?
... 4.5 minutes
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TV Review: Frederick Douglass’ and
Harriet Tubman’s Paths of Freedom and Faith
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‘Religion for both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass was the foundation in many ways of who they are,’ said co-director Stanley Nelson.
By Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service
October 11, 2022 (RNS) — Frederick Douglass called the Bible one of his most important resources and was involved in Black church circles as he spent his life working to end what he called the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
Harriet Tubman sensed divine inspiration amid her actions to free herself and dozens of others who had been enslaved in the American South.
The two abolitionists are subjects of a twin set of documentaries, “Becoming Frederick Douglass” and “Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom,” co-productions of Maryland Public Television and Firelight Films and released by PBS this month (October).
“I think that the faith journey of both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass was a huge part of their story,” Stanley Nelson, co-director with Nicole London of the two hour-long films, said in an interview with Religion News Service.
The films, whose production took more than three years in part due to a COVID-19 hiatus, detail the horrors of slavery both Tubman and Douglass witnessed. Tubman saw her sister being sold to a new enslaver and torn away from her children. A young Douglass hid in a closet as he watched his aunt being beaten. They each expressed beliefs in the providence of God playing a role in the gaining of their freedom.
Scholars in both films spoke of the faith of these “original abolitionists,” as University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha called people like Tubman, who took to pulpits and lecterns as they strove to end the ownership of members of their race and sought to convince white people to join their cause.
“The Bible was foundational to Douglass as a writer, orator, and activist,” Harvard University scholar John Stauffer told Religion News Service in an email, expanding on his comments in the film about the onetime lay preacher. “It influenced him probably more than any other single work.”
Stauffer said the holy book, which shaped Douglass’ talks and writings, was the subject of lessons at a Sunday school he organized to teach other slaves.
“It’s impossible to appreciate or understand Douglass without recognizing the enormous influence the Bible had on him and his extraordinary knowledge of it,” Stauffer added.
Actor Wendell Pierce provides the voice of Douglass in the films, quoting him saying in an autobiography that William Lloyd Garrison’s weekly abolitionist newspaper The Liberator “took a place in my heart second only to the Bible.”
The documentary notes that Douglass was part of Baltimore’s African Methodist Episcopal Church circles that included many free Black people. Scholars say he met his future wife Anna Murray, who encouraged him to pursue his own freedom, in that city.
“The AME Church was central in not only creating a space for African Americans to worship but creating a network of support for African Americans who were committed to anti-slavery,” said Georgetown University historian Marcia Chatelain, in the film.
The Douglass documentary is set to premiere Tuesday (Oct. 11) on PBS. It and the Tubman documentary, which first aired Oct. 4, will be available to stream for free for 30 days on PBS.org and the PBS video app after their initial air dates. After streaming on PBS’ website and other locations for a month, the films, which include footage from Maryland’s Eastern Shore where both Douglass and Tubman were born, will then be available on PBS Passport.
“God’s time is always near,” she says, in words she told writer Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney around 1850. “He set the North Star in the heavens. He gave me the strength in my limbs. He meant I should be free.”
Tubman, who early in life sustained a serious injury and experienced subsequent seizures and serious headaches, often had visions she interpreted as “signposts from God,” said Rutgers University historian Erica A. Dunbar in the film.
The woman known as “Moses” freed slaves by leading them through nighttime escapes and later as a scout for the Union Army in the Civil War.
“She never accepted praise or responsibility, even, for these great feats,” Dunbar said. “She always saw herself as a vessel of her God.”
But, nevertheless, praise for Tubman came from Douglass, who noted in an 1868 letter to her that while his work was often public, hers was primarily in secret, recognized only by the “heartfelt, ‘God bless you’” from people she had helped reach freedom.
Nelson, a religiously unaffiliated man who created films about the mission work of the United Methodist Church early in his career, said the documentary helps shed light on the importance faith held for Tubman. ...Read More
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Book Review:
Red Love, For All
Family is a terrible way to satisfy our desire for love and care, according to the writer and academic Sophie Lewis. The solution? Abolish it.
By Erin Maglaque
New Statesman
Let us begin by abolishing our kitchens. For the 19th-century silk merchant and socialist philosopher Charles Fourier, utopia was the kitchenless house. Men and women would live collectively, cooking instead in open common kitchens and free canteens, serving up marmalades and pastries and lemonades in abundance.
The Fourierist communities that arose in the mid-19th century US built their homes just as he imagined. Their communal life would relieve women – in the words of the radical feminist and utopian architect Alice Constance Austin – of “the thankless and unending drudgery of an inconceivably stupid and inefficient system by which her labors are confiscated”. By Austin’s calculation, those labors amounted to the preparation of 1,095 meals a year for their husbands and children.
If we begin by abolishing our kitchens, what else might we get a taste for destroying, and for creating? A bit of self-governance here, some collectively organized childcare there: begin with the kitchen, and we might end up with a whole new society. This is the premise of the revolutionary politics of family abolition. The US-based writer and academic Sophie Lewis is our most eloquent, furious and funny critic of how the family is a terrible way to satisfy all of our desires for love, care, nourishment. Her new book, Abolish the Family, offers a powerful introduction to the world beyond the nuclear family. Lewis is the author, too, of the incendiary Full Surrogacy Now (2019), which explored the abuses of the surrogacy industry as a lens into radically expanded concepts of kinship.
The family, Lewis and other abolitionists and feminists argue, privatizes care. The legal and economic structure of the nuclear household warps love and intimacy into abuse, ownership, scarcity. Children are private property, legally owned and fully economically dependent on their parents. The hard work of care – looking after children, cooking and cleaning – is hidden away and devalued, performed for free by women or for scandalously low pay by domestic workers. Even the happiest families, in the words of the writer Ursula Le Guin, are built upon a “whole substructure of sacrifices, repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancings of greater or lesser evils”. If we abolish the family, we abolish the most fundamental unit of privatization and scarcity in our society. More care, more love, for all.
Lewis is clear-eyed and witty about the inevitable knee-jerk reaction to calls for family abolition. (“So! The left is trying to take grandma away, now, and confiscate the kids, and this is supposed to be progressive? What the fuck?”) And it’s true that family abolition, like other abolitionist movements, presents certain discomforts. Maybe you love your family! Or maybe you just like cooking in your own kitchen. Lewis acknowledges these discomforts, and asks us to imagine beyond them. The family isn’t actually any good at creating intimacy, Lewis argues; the family creates, in fact, a dearth of care, with shreds and scraps of intimacy fought out between overworked parents and totally dependent kids, hidden behind the locked doors of private property.
Family abolition asks us to take seriously the idea that children are everyone’s responsibility – not just that of their parents. This is an idea with a long genealogy, which Lewis traces in the messy histories of the activists who have tried to live according to a more emancipatory family politics. We meet the Russian revolutionary thinker and activist Alexandra Kollontai, who demanded that “society will feed, bring up and educate the child”, and that, “The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it extends to all the children of the great, proletarian family.” This was a red love, a social love, that broke open the narrowly bourgeois love of biological parenthood.
In the 1960s, the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone argued that women’s and children’s liberation were inextricably linked, and could only be achieved through “the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole”. The gay liberation movement organized a leafletting campaign at the US Democratic National Convention in 1972, demanding that legal rights parents hold over their children should be dissolved, and “free twenty-four-hour child care centers should be established where faggots and lesbians can share the responsibility of child rearing”. Between 1966 and 1975, the National Welfare Rights Organization – made up mostly of working-class black women activists – reshaped and expanded welfare programs outside of the structure of the male-breadwinner household. Though these activists each began from distinct critiques and advanced their own agendas, children’s liberation – from the patriarchal family, from legal ownership, from economic dependency – was central to their ideas of social transformation.
The political imaginary of abolition is framed by difficult questions about destruction and creation, and ultimately about the nature of social change. Lewis takes her cue from the prison abolition activist and theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who argues that the prison abolition is not only an ending, but the creation of something new: real justice. The family, like prison, seems an inevitable part of our social fabric; and yet we do not necessarily want to know what happens within them. Abolitionist politics means thinking hard about the realities of those institutions – the police, the monarchy, or immigration enforcement, or the family – that we take for granted as most natural and inevitable in our lives, and then working for something better. Abolition brings a new world into being that couldn’t have been imagined before the struggle to abolish the old one; abolition, in Gilmore’s words, requires us “to change one thing: everything”.
And yet the question of what we ultimately want from family abolition is a difficult one. Do we want to refashion or repurpose those ideals of kinship and care that undoubtedly provide a source of pleasure and refuge now? Is anything of kinship redeemable? Does the positive, affirming side of kinship actually “spring from the family”, Lewis wonders, or “survive in spite of it”? She argues for the latter. But the history of the family complicates any straightforward account of social transformation. As Lewis explores, black feminist writers have long recognized the ambiguous place of care within families subject to the historical violence of slavery and racial capitalism.
In her 2016 essay “The Belly of the World”, the American scholar Saidiya Hartman writes about this paradox: that the black woman’s caring labors are both the product of slavery and a means of survival; a refuge, a creative source of sustenance, in the face of that same violence. “This brilliant and formidable labor of care,” Hartman writes, “paradoxically, has been produced through violent structures of slavery, anti-black racism, virulent sexism, and disposability.” Lewis handles this complexity with sensitivity, and yet comes to a stark conclusion: even when the family is a “shield that humans have taken up to survive a war”, we still must come to believe that the war does not have to go on forever. “What would it mean not to need the Black family?”, she asks, by which I think she means: how might we imagine a world in which we don’t need to take refuge from each other?
In her history of abolitionism, Lewis writes of a 30-year period between 1985 and 2015 when family abolition was largely ignored as a political aim. Fellow millennials might recognize our own lifespans in that 30-year bracket, and might justifiably wonder why our parents’ generation abandoned such politics. Lewis gestures towards a number of possible explanations. When the radical demands of the 1960s failed, feminists retreated into nostalgia and a reaffirmation of the family (the late activist Barbara Ehrenreich demurred: “We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.”) The reactionary propaganda campaign that associated gay life with pedophilia during the Reagan era summarily extinguished the gay liberation movement’s politics of collective childcare and replaced it with a narrowly rights-based agenda. Certainly, in my own middle-class childhood, the running of the family as a population of high-achieving, high-investment tiny entrepreneurs (“via violin-playing and other forms of so-called human capital investment,” as Lewis has it) was antithetical to any kind of collective politics or an emancipatory reimagining of childhood.
Lewis acknowledges, too, that there is something psychically challenging about family abolition. As with all abolitionist politics, family abolition calls into question some of our most deeply held notions of ourselves: about kinship, belonging, identity; about what we consider natural, about what can be lived differently. But I wonder if Lewis overestimates just how terrifying her audience will find the idea that the family is a “scarcity-based trauma-machine”; that is, a way of organizing society that encloses care within the household, and shuts all kinds of abuse, neglect and lovelessness behind a locked door. Burned out from pandemic parenting, facing immense childcare shortages and costs, women are leaving the workforce in record numbers, and in the US, forced birth and baby formula shortages are making crisis-parenting the rule, not the exception. The call for a revolutionary way of reconfiguring how we care for each other is more essential than ever, and Lewis’s manifesto is an irrepressible spark to our very tired imaginations.
And yet Lewis is right, too, that a critique of the family remains essentially unthinkable in our political climate. The list of demands made by earlier family abolitionist movements – free 24-hour community-organized childcare; breakfast and after-school clubs; community kitchens; expanded food stamp programs; the freedom from work – these were middle-of-the-road demands that now appear on the farthest possible horizon of progressive feminist politics. The Labour Party is, after all, currently campaigning on a platform for “a future where families come first”, which seems to begin and end with the dream of your very own mortgaged kitchen in which to degrade yourself.
In her 1977 book of poetry Marxism for Infants, Denise Riley writes: “today it is all grandiose domestic visions truly,/in St Petersburg now Leningrad we have communal kitchens/the cooking is dreadful but we get to meet our friends”.
Both feminism and abolitionist politics ask us to imagine the unimaginable: “To transform the world”, as the philosopher Amia Srinivasan has written, “beyond recognition.” A daunting task. Easier, perhaps, to begin on a domestic scale; easier to begin by exchanging the loneliness of our own private kitchens for cooking with our friends, and then see what happens next. ...Read More
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