Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism |
|
Russia Aiming at Annexation of Four Ukraine Regions |
|
The cartoon to the right is a bit over the top. But it tells an important story, the danger of changing borders with armed force in Europe and elsewhere.
Thls happened all the time in earlier eras and decades. But since the rise of the UN and the growing independence of its General Assembly, along with nuclear 'umbrellas,' it's been considered a very bad idea.
First, the UN Charter forbids it. Within its provisions is all-round respect for national sovereignty. Violation of this provision by any party usually results in local armed conflict, with the prospect of wider war. Second, the UN requires negotiation and mutual agreement, without the threat of force, for any such changes advocated by one or more parties. We are seeing how the violation of these universal agreements unfolds into escalation. Russia's attempt at 'referendums' within areas under its occupation is both a sham and a non-starter, convincing no one. Stop it and engage in real negotiations as your troops pull back and leave.
|
|
 |
WE ARE INVITING FEEDBACK!
Please send us your letters, comments, queries, complaints, new ideas. Just keep them short and civil. Longer commentaries and be submitted as articles.
DIFFICULTY READING US?
|
We're going to try something new, and you are all invited.
Saturday Morning Coffee!
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!
|
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In 2002, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro Ruz visited the country’s National Ballet School to inaugurate the 18th Havana International Ballet Festival. Founded in 1948 by the prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Alonso (1920–2019), the school struggled financially until the Cuban Revolution decided that ballet – like other art forms – must be available to everyone and so must be socially financed. At the school in 2002, Castro remembered that the first festival, held in 1960, ‘asserted Cuba’s cultural vocation, identity, and nationality, even under the most adverse circumstances, when major dangers and threats loomed over the country’.
Ballet, like so many cultural forms, had been stolen from popular participation and enjoyment. The Cuban Revolution wanted to return this artistic practice to the people as part of its determination to advance human dignity. To build a revolution in a country assaulted by colonial barbarism, the new revolutionary process had to both establish the country’s sovereignty and build the dignity of each of its people. This dual task is the work of national liberation. ‘Without culture’, Castro said, ‘freedom is not possible’. ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Saladin Muhammad,
1946-2022, Presente!
The following statement was issued by the North Carolina-based Black Workers for Justice on Sept. 19. Read at tinyurl.com/55kuk8ty.
Greetings to Our Revolutionary Family, Friends and Comrades,
It is with great sadness and profound loss that we announce the passing of our exemplary revolutionary warrior and leader, Comrade Brother Saladin Muhammad. Saladin passed this morning after a long battle with illness. His wife, Naeema and son Muhammad were with him as he transitioned. He fought until the end. They described him as being at peace.
Brother Saladin leaves an outstanding legacy of revolutionary commitment, leadership, consciousness and direct organizing of our people’s struggle for national liberation. He was a commander-in-chief of revolutionary forces throughout the Black Liberation Movement and a staunch fighter for the Black Working Class. He worked tirelessly and with phenomenal energy to organize, guide and lead our people’s fights and battles against oppression. He was an internationalist, upholding the worldwide struggle against capitalism and imperialism. His intellect, insight and analysis was outstanding in the theory and practice of organizing class and revolutionary struggle and the tactics and strategy of social transformation, national liberation and socialism for the African American people.
Saladin’s unmatched organizing skills led to the formation of the Black Workers for Justice, UE Local 150, and the Southern Workers Assembly, just to recognize only a few of his impactful accomplishments. And these organizational formations of the Black working class were built in the context of North Carolina, a state widely recognized for its anti-unionism and racist history and in the U.S. South, where the lack of a strong, progressive labor movement in the southeast region has been the Achilles heel of the U.S. national labor movement. The struggle to build a “new trade unionism” in the U.S. South must continue.
His leadership and guidance, upon which thousands around the country and the world relied, is irreplaceable and will be sorely missed by all of us. Saladin was active in the struggles for justice and liberation for more than 50 years.
Saladin Muhammad ¡Presente!
The Executive Committee,
Black Workers for Justice
|
Ying Lee Kelly, 1932-2022, Presente!
Remembering Ying Lee
Looking back at the life of a trailblazing activist and Berkeley’s first Asian American city council member.
By David Bacon
The Nation
SEPT 21, 2022 - Chinese American community leader Ying Lee Kelley, former Berkeley City Council member, School Board member and longtime assistant to Congressman Ron Dellums. (David Bacon)
When the pandemic started, I took a walk with Ying Lee, who died this week at the age of 90. I took some photographs of her, and she talked about her memories of her childhood in China. Then we laughed at how we defied the Berkeley School Board.
Ying’s father came from China to the United States as a secretary in one of the tongs in the late 1930s, leaving Ying, her mom and siblings behind. A harrowing flight from the invading Japanese army took them from Shanghai to Chungking, and finally landed them in San Francisco after the war.
When I was at Berkeley High School in the early ’60s Ying was a teacher. Berkeley High already had Young Democrats and Young Republicans Clubs, so we organized a Young Socialist club with her son Paul and another friend, David Laub. Ying was our sponsor. ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Photo: António Guterres made his comments at the start of a meeting of the UN security council in New York. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
Russia’s Nuclear Threats ‘Totally Unacceptable’, Says UN Chief
António Guterres also denounces plans to annex parts of Ukraine as a violation of international law
By Julian Borger in New York
The Guardian
Sept 22, 2022 - The UN secretary general has issued a strongly worded rebuke to Russia for “totally unacceptable” nuclear threats and denounced its plans to annex parts of Ukraine as a “violation of the UN charter and of international law”.
António Guterres also said the impact of the conflict could cause a food supply crisis next year. “Simply put the world will run out of food,” he said.
Guterres was speaking at the start of a UN security council meeting the day after Vladimir Putin raised the stakes in his invasion of Ukraine, announcing a partial mobilization and threatening the use of nuclear weapons “if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened”. Putin also approved referendums in four Ukrainian regions intended to pave the way for annexation, raising the prospect that he would then deem Ukrainian operations to recapture them as a threat to Russia’s “territorial integrity”.
The US president, Joe Biden, rejected the nuclear threat as reckless, and Ukraine’s backers said they would not be deterred from providing military support.
“The idea of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, has become a subject of debate. This in itself is totally unacceptable,” Guterres said.
So-Called Referenda
“I’m also deeply concerned by reports of plans to organize so-called referenda in areas of Ukraine that are not currently under government control,” he said. “Any annexation of a state’s territory by another state resulting from a threat or use of force is a violation of the UN charter and of international law.”
Russia was widely condemned at Thursday’s security council meeting chaired by the French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, repeated Beijing’s line that the UN charter and territorial integrity must be supported, without directly criticizing Russia, which is an ally. Wang did not, however, offer Moscow any rhetorical support in a carefully worded address.
The council was briefed by the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC), Karim Khan, on the investigation of mass graves found in Ukrainian towns liberated from Russian occupation. Khan said the “echoes of Nuremberg should be heard today”, invoking the precedent set by the war crimes trials of the Nazis.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, did not address Guterres’s comment, repeating Moscow’s discredited claims that Ukraine was being run by “neo-Nazis” and the war had been caused by mistreatment of Russian speakers in the Donbas. He said Russia had no confidence in the ICC. Lavrov was not in the chamber for the ministers who spoke before him, and left as soon as he had delivered his own address.
The expansion of Russian conscription initially intended to draft 300,000 soldiers, has triggered protests around Russia and an exodus of military-age men.
Putin’s escalation of the war in the face of territorial losses to Ukrainian forces has led to a new round of sanctions being considered. EU foreign ministers agreed in Brussels to prepare a new package expected to include broad economic and individual measures.
Guterres also pointed to the success of the UN-brokered Black Sea grain initiative in exporting more than 4.3m tonnes of food, as a result of which he said food prices had dropped sharply.
But he said a drop in Russian exports of fertilizer and ammonia was creating already causing shortages in West Africa and elsewhere. “If the fertilizer market is not stabilized next year it could bring the food supply crisis,” he said.
In his speech on Wednesday Biden said that food and fertilizer were not subject to international sanctions.
“Let me be perfectly clear about something: Our sanctions explicitly allow – explicitly allow – Russia the ability to export food and fertilizer. No limitation. It’s Russia’s war that is worsening food insecurity, and only Russia can end it,” he said.
Speaking at Thursday’s security council session, the UK’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, said similar and blamed Moscow for the crisis.
“Let us be clear, we are not sanctioning food,” he said. “It is Russia’s actions that are preventing food and fertilizer getting to developing countries. It is Russia’s tactics and bombs that are to blame for destroying Ukraine’s farm infrastructure and delaying its exports.” ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Police officers detain a man protesting against the escalation of the war on Ukraine announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Moscow, Russia, on September 21, 2022.
More Than 1,100 Russians Arrested for Protesting Putin’s War Escalation
By Kenny Stancil
Common Dreams via Truthout
Sept 22, 2022 - More than 1,100 people and counting have been arrested at anti-war protests held in 38 cities across Russia following President Vladimir Putin’s Wednesday announcement that as many as 300,000 reservists will be called up to serve in a “partial mobilization” aimed at beating back Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
That’s according to OVD-Info, an independent human rights group based in Russia.
“The most valuable thing that they can take from us is the life of our children,” one unnamed Moscow resident told The Associated Press. “I won’t give them [the] life of my child.” Asked whether protesting would make a difference, she said: “It won’t help, but it’s my civic duty to express my stance. No to war!”
The Vesna anti-war coalition called for demonstrations, declaring: “Thousands of Russian men — our fathers, brothers, and husbands — will be thrown into the meat grinder of the war. What will they be dying for? What will mothers and children be crying for?”
AP reported:
As protest calls circulated online, the Moscow prosecutor’s office warned that organizing or participating in such actions could lead to up to 15 years in prison. Authorities issued similar warnings ahead of other protests recently. Wednesday’s were the first nationwide anti-war protests since the fighting began in late February.
[…]
The state communication watchdog Roskomnadzor also warned media that access to their websites would be blocked for transmitting “false information” about the mobilization. It was unclear exactly what that meant.
Russia’s criminalization of anti-war dissent, journalist and author Laurie Garrett noted on social media, means that it takes “real conviction and courage” for people to hit the streets.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said in a video message from jail recorded and published by his lawyers that Putin’s mobilization order makes clear that “the criminal war is getting worse, deepening, and Putin is trying to involve as many people as possible in this.”
“It’s being done just to let one person keep his grip on personal power,” added Navalny.
The Vesna Youth Democratic Movement, meanwhile, issued an online appeal urging Russian soldiers to resist Putin’s war on Ukraine.
“We call on the Russian military in units and at the frontline to refuse to participate in the ‘special operation’ or to surrender as soon as possible,” the group said in a statement posted to its website.
“You don’t have to die for Putin,” the statement continued. “You are needed in Russia by those who love you. For the authorities, you are just cannon fodder, where you will be squandered without any meaning or purpose.” ...Read More
|
|
Peace Activists Are Hitting The Streets Across The United States
By Marcy Winograd
Independent Media Institute
Sept 20, 2022 - On September 18, President Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin, “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t” use nuclear weapons in retaliation for severe battlefield losses in Ukraine. While Putin dismissed Biden’s worries as unfounded, the specter of nuclear armageddon drove U.S. antiwar activists to the streets days before in a September Week of Action organized by the Peace in Ukraine Coalition.
Demanding a “ceasefire now,” activists hosted antiwar events in D.C., San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Madison, Boston, Rockville, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, San Pedro, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles.
The Peace in Ukraine Coalition—consisting of CODEPINK, Veterans for Peace, Democratic Socialists of America, Massachusetts Peace Action, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-U.S., and other organizations—mobilized for negotiations, not escalation, in what CODEPINK describes as a proxy war threatening a direct war between the two most heavily armed nuclear nations, the United States and Russia.
With President Biden asking Congress for another $13.7 billion for Ukraine, $7.2 billion for weapons and military training, activists delivered letters to their U.S. House and Senate representatives, some letters simply urging a ceasefire, others pushing for a no vote on the next weapons request folded into a $47 billion COVID-19 relief bill. That bill, called a continuing resolution, must be voted on in one form or another by September 30 to avoid a federal government shutdown.
If the resolution passes with Biden’s request, military analysts say it would bring this year’s total for Ukraine to $67 billion. The amount allotted for weapons, military training, and intelligence could surpass $40 billion, four times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency during an existential climate crisis of wildfires, droughts, storms, and rising sea levels.
In the nation’s capital, CODEPINK co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, together with Colonel Ann Wright and other activists, kicked off the Week of Action, going door to door to the offices of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), where the most natural antiwar allies would, theoretically, be found. While some members of the caucus called for much-needed diplomacy and raised concerns about the risk of nuclear war—either through a miscalculation or an intentional first strike—not one member of the nearly 100-member CPC will commit to voting against more weapons for Ukraine.
Benjamin told the press, “Further escalation should be unthinkable, but so should a long war of endless crushing artillery barrages and brutal urban and trench warfare that slowly and agonizingly destroys Ukraine, killing hundreds of Ukrainians with each day that passes. The only realistic alternative to this endless slaughter is a return to peace talks to bring the fighting to an end.”
GOP right wants to cut arms aid to Ukraine
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer do not make it easy for Democrats to break ranks—as the Republicans are doing ahead of the midterms—on the question of weapons for Ukraine. Pelosi and Schumer embed humanitarian aid and military dollars in the same legislation, making it hard for progressive Democrats to join with the 57 Republicans, among them hard-core Trumpers, Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14), Lauren Boebert (CO-03), and Jim Jordan (OH-04), who voted against previous Ukraine packages.
Since the Russian invasion on February 24, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have died, and according to the United Nations, 12 million have been displaced, either internally or throughout Eastern Europe. The Pentagon estimates 80,000 Russian soldiers have been killed.
Partners in the Peace in Ukraine Coalition condemn the Russian invasion but argue there is no military solution to a war that was provoked by the same neoconservatives responsible for the disastrous U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Through successive administrations, the voices for a unipolar world in which the United States dominates led to the expansion of NATO, a hostile nuclear-armed military alliance, from 12 countries after the fall of the Soviet Union to 30 countries, including some that border Russia: Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Lithuania.
In addition to the expansion of NATO, organizations in the Peace in Ukraine Coalition cite other provocations: U.S. support for a 2014 coup of Ukraine’s democratically elected Russia-friendly president and years of U.S. arms shipments—from Presidents Obama to Trump to Biden—to undermine the 2015 MINSK II peace agreement. That accord signed by Russia and Ukraine was to end the civil war that followed the 2014 coup and left an estimated 14,000 people dead in Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region. Fighting between the swastika-flag-waving Azov Battalion and Russian separatists preceded Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, though corporate media often fails to mention this.
On Thursday, September 15, demonstrators in San Francisco’s Financial District marched from the Senate offices of Alex Padilla and Dianne Feinstein to deliver letters in opposition to funding a protracted war in Ukraine.
Massachusetts Peace Action activists camped outside the offices of three Democratic House members—Jake Auchincloss, Katherine Clark, and Stephen Lynch—to implore them to support a ceasefire.
Milwaukee antiwar activists, including a county supervisor, took their peace flags and “Diplomacy, Not War” signs to the campus of conservative Marquette University, where they passed out hundreds of flyers with QR codes for students to email their Congress members for a ceasefire. Organizer Jim Carpenter, co-chair (with myself) of the foreign policy team of Progressive Democrats of America, told skeptics who want a fight to the last Ukrainian, “Are you more concerned about saving lives or saving territory?” ...Read More
|
|
Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture: |
|
|
Photo: Audience members put their index finger up to symbolize America First while President Donald Trump speaks at a Save America Rally to support Republican candidates running for state and federal offices in the state at the Covelli Centre before on September 17, 2022 in Youngstown, Ohio. (Photo: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
Fascist Fingers in the Air: Terrifying American Nightmare Unfolds at Trump Rally
A terrifying Trump rally in Ohio—punctuated by a dictatorial rant backed by QAnon-associated music—highlights an alarming GOP turn.
By Will Bunch
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Sept 21, 2022 - If you are a political fanatic, you've surely heard the old saying that when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. That's been proven true in this fraught year of 2022 as Christian nationalism rises to our extreme right, but no one predicted this:
That U.S. authoritarianism would also come with a bat-guano crazy musical soundtrack—music that sounds like a Bible Belt altar riff but is actually tied to the weirdly popular QAnon conspiracy theory whose legion of followers believe there's an elite global cabal of child-trafficking, baby-blood-drinking liberal politicians and movie stars.
This terrifying crossing of some kind of autocratic Rubicon happened—where else?—at a Donald Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Saturday night.
Trump rallies are a tricky thing to cover, some 20 months after the 45th president left the White House in seeming disgrace after a failed coup and two impeachments. There's an understandable desire to want to not give these increasingly hate-drenched rallies any oxygen, in the vain hope the flame will completely flicker out. And his Fidel Castro-length rants increasingly offer little political insight but long flights of narcissistic grievance about his 2020 election loss and an enemies list that grows longer each day.
What transpired Saturday was a culmination of an American nightmare.
But even had it been stripped of its creepy musical backing, Trump's apocalyptic closing diatribe from an arena in the epicenter of Rust Belt industrial decay demands our attention—as the current front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination continues to steer his followers toward an authoritarian cult of personality, committed more to its warped leader and his perceived slights than any justifiable cause.
Trump insisted, without evidence, that Russia's bloody unprovoked invasion of Ukraine "never would have happened with me as your commander in chief, and for four long years, it didn't happen." The ex-POTUS veered from China threatening Taiwan to a litany of grievances against the FBI agents and prosecutors, honing in on his cache of top-secret documents and his post-2020 election tampering to an old enemy in the media: "Fake news is all you get, and they are truly the enemy of the people."
That echo of Joseph Stalin wasn't his only callback to an era where rising dictatorship inevitably led to death on a massive scale. "We have a president who is cognitively impaired," Trump said, falsely, "and in no condition to lead our country, which may end up in World War III."
The ax-grinding is getting worse, but the music is new.
The swelling, quasi-religious (or maybe late-night inspirational infomercial) melody that accompanied Trump's Ohio jeremiad wasn't random, according to Trump-tracking experts. Last month, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters for America identified that rising melody—hinting of a coming storm—that appeared again Saturday in Youngstown as either a) "Wwg1wga," with its title an abbreviation of the main QAnon slogan "Where we go one, we go all," that was posted to Spotify in 2020 and often appears with online posts about the conspiracy theory, or b) an exactly identical number called "Mirrors," as claimed by Team Trump.
Media Matters noted Trump's use of the tune in an August posting of an anti-Biden rant to his website Truth Social sparked praise and great excitement in the online community of QAnon true believers, with one saying it "might be the biggest nod they've ever given us [to be honest]." Wrote another: "That's not an accident. Team Trump knows exactly what they're doing."
|
|
|
|
Photo: Former President Donald Trump speaks at a Save America Rally to support Republican candidates running for state and federal offices in the state at the Covelli Centre on Sept. 17, 2022 in Youngstown, Ohio. (PHOTO BY JEFF SWENSEN/GETTY IMAGES)
Trump Is Now Claiming He Can Declassify Documents Telepathically
The very desperate former president went on Fox News to vent to Sean Hannity about his legal woes, and offer a new defense of his document-hoarding
By Ryan Bort
Rolling Stone
Sept 22, 2022 - DONALD TRUMP WENT on Fox News Wednesday night to vent to Sean Hannity about the civil fraud lawsuit New York Attorney General Letitia James slapped on him and three of his children earlier in the day. The former president didn’t exactly clear his name, instead claiming repeatedly that he has plenty of cash, very little debt, and that James’ investigation is nothing more than a political stunt.
The conversation eventually turned to another of Trump’s myriad legal quandaries: the Justice Department’s investigation into the material he was — and maybe still is — hoarding at Mar-a-Lago. Trump has long argued that he declassified all of the highly sensitive classified documents the FBI retrieved from his Palm Beach estate last month, a claim so dubious that his lawyers have refused to make it in court.
Trump told Hannity not to worry, though. There need not be any physical or even anecdotal evidence that he declassified the documents, as the president has the power to do it with his mind.
“If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified — even by thinking about it,” Trump said. “Because you’re sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you’re sending it. There doesn’t have to be a process. There can be a process, but there doesn’t have to be.”
Presidents are able to declassify documents, but there is typically a procedure for doing so. It’s up for debate whether presidents are required to follow any such procedure, but the idea that they can declassify sensitive material just by thinking about it is, of course, absurd.
“Hypothetical questions like, ‘What if a president thinks to himself that something is declassified? Does that change its status?’ are so speculative that their practical meaning is negligible,” Steven Aftergood, a secrecy specialist with the Federation of American Scientists, recently told The New York Times. “It’s a logical mess. The system is not meant to be deployed in such an arbitrary fashion.”
The legal system isn’t likely to buy Trump’s claim, either. Judge Raymond Dearie told the former president’s legal team on Tuesday that unless they provide some concrete evidence that Trump declassified the documents clearly labeled as classified, he will treat them as if they are, indeed, classified.
Dearie last week was designated a “special master” to review the documents seized by the FBI in order to flag any privilege issues. The hearing on Tuesday was a blow to Trump’s defense, especially considering it was his own legal team that recommended Dearie for the position. Trump tried to distance himself from the appointment when pressed by Hannity on Wednesday.
“I didn’t know any of the people involved,” he said.
Trump’s claim that he could declassify documents just by thinking about it may not have even been the most ridiculous thing he said to Hannity about the Mar-a-Lago investigation. Later during the same rant, he said there’s been a lot of “speculation” that the FBI was actually looking for Hillary Clinton’s emails at Mar-a-Lago — either that or information pertaining to the “Russia, Russia, Russia stuff.” These are the only two issues that would warrant the “severity” of the raid, Trump claimed.
The Justice Department has noted that it recovered nearly 200 classified documents during the raid, including two dozen labeled “TOP SECRET.” It’s been reported that some of the documents pertained to an unidentified “foreign government’s nuclear-defense readiness,” which seems pretty severe. ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Brittany Ramos DeBarros Shows How It’s Done
In her losing race for Congress, DeBarros offers a winning lesson: take on corporate Dems in the primary, join forces to beat MAGA in the general.
By Max Elbaum
Convergence
Sept 21, 2022 - Much of the Left wrestles with the complexities of navigating a political moment when racist authoritarians are driving toward full control of the federal government and all too many Democratic politicians offer only a corporate-friendly and militarist agenda.
How do we stave off MAGA without being reduced to carrying water for Democrats who resist desperately needed, deep-going change? What are ways to contend over program and vision with mainstream Democrats that strengthen rather than undermine a joint fight against the threat of today’s growing fascist movement?
There’s no one-size-fits-all pattern for threading through those challenges. But Brittany Ramos DeBarros, whose primary challenge to a mainstream Democrat in New York’s tough 11th Congressional District was rooted in peace and justice politics, offers an example of how it can be done.
Fight like hell in the primary…
Before entering the electoral fray, DeBarros was a grassroots peace activist. An Afro-Latina veteran who had served in Afghanistan, she spoke out against the U.S. war while still under military discipline. After her discharge, she became a full-time organizer for About Face. She ran in New York City’s most conservative House district. Her opponent was a former incumbent in that district, moderate Democrat Max Rose, who was defeated by Trumpist Republican Nicole Malliotakis in 2020. Rose, also a veteran, is far from the worst Democrat bidding for a House seat. (For a full profile of the DeBarros campaign, see Militarism on the Ballot: Two Vets Vie in NY York Primary.)
DeBarros pulled no punches in her campaign. She hit hard on housing issues and COVID relief as well as peace, and she campaigned all over the district. She raised more than $600,000, the vast bulk from small-dollar donations. She was endorsed by Our Revolution, the Working Families Party and Jewish Voice for Peace. She is a member of Democratic Socialists of America.
The Democratic Party establishment went all out for her opponent. “DeBarros’s political insurgency resembles that of other young leftist women of color—most famously Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York… many of them working-class, who have been challenging incumbents of the Democratic establishment and often winning,” Liza Featherstone wrote in The Nation.
No one in her district (or beyond) had any illusion that DeBarros and Rose advocated the same program. Those voting for DeBarros—or against her—knew that she was someone who would take on the corporate Democrats. And it was no secret that her effort was connected to a nationwide effort to build progressive power for the long haul.
…And beat MAGA in the general
DeBarros lost the primary, winning just over 20% of the vote. She conceded the election and sent a thank-you message to her supporters that forcefully made two points:
One, she is not going anywhere and will work to nurture the “precious spark for change” her campaign cultivated.
Two, everyone must do “everything in our power” to prevent the Republicans from gaining a majority in Congress. “That means we must do whatever we can in this district to oust Nicole Malliotakis, and others like her in districts around the country.”
DeBarros closed her message with:
“We must have the discipline and courage to keep our flames burning and fight off the darkness that we face today, so that we can continue to build toward a true victory for all of us tomorrow.”
That’s how it’s done.
Here is the full text of Brittany Ramos DeBarros’s post-primary message to supporters:
Thank You.
I know the outcome of this race isn’t what we wanted. I am heartbroken for our communities right now and I won’t pretend otherwise.
And also, I am so proud we built a powerful campaign centered on working people, our interests and a bold, principled vision for our future. I am so grateful for all that we have accomplished together. What we have cultivated here is a small, precious spark for change amidst the darkest of conditions. It can only grow.
I am not going anywhere and neither is what we started.
Thank you. Thank you for every call you made, every dollar you gave, every text you sent, every post you retweeted, every door you knocked, every event you tabled and every kind word you shared. Words will not do justice.
Your contributions left imprints on our communities that will endure.
I am sorry to say that I believe things will get worse before they get better in the coming months and years.
We face highly organized and well-resourced forces that are determined to drag this country into full-blown authoritarian fascism. To answer them, we have Democratic leadership who are mostly feckless, cowardly, and out-of-touch.
Whether Max or Nicole win in November, NY-11 will continue to suffer under the minority rule of millionaires bought and paid for by special interests. That is the painful truth. We must have the courage to face it.
It is also urgently true that if Republicans win control of the house in 2022, the likelihood that there will be any semblance of election integrity in 2024 dwindles drastically.
We must do everything in our power to prevent that outcome.
That means we must do whatever we can in this district to oust Nicole Malliotakis, and others like her in districts around the country.
From the moment we launched our campaign, I knew that cynicism and despair were our true barriers. To have hope requires great faith, discipline and courage. My message remains the same now in loss as it did at launch:
I believe in us. We are the majority. We are already powerful. We owe each other too much – we need each other too much – to surrender to despair.
We must have the discipline and courage to keep our flames burning and fight off the darkness that we face today, so that we can continue to build toward a true victory for all of us tomorrow.
I hope you will join me.
In deep love and solidarity always,
Brittany Ramos DeBarros
Featured image: Compilation photo of Brittany Ramos DeBarros (credit: Brittany for the People) & the Staten Island ferry (credit: Public Domain Pictures)
Max Elbaum is a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections (OR Books, 2022).
|
|
Left Party (Sweden) On Elections: Right-Wing Coalition Wins Election By The Narrowest Of Margins
By Petter Nilsson, Rikard Warlenius
Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
Sept 18, 2022 - With almost all votes counted from Sunday’s election, it looks like Sweden’s right-wing parties are set to take power with a razor-thin majority, ending eight years of social democratic government. For the first time, this conservative coalition also includes the far-right Sweden Democrats, who have emerged as the country’s second-largest party, despite their roots in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement. The result is an evident decline for the progressive spectrum of Swedish politics as a whole and the Left party in particular.
As of Monday, the right-wing bloc of Moderates, Christian Democrats, Liberals and the far-right Sweden Democrats have won 49,7 % of the vote, against the 48,8 % won by the other possible coalition of Social Democrats, Left, Greens and Centre party. The final votes will be counted on Wednesday but the Moderates leader Ulf Kristersson says he is ready to start forming a government.
After the 2018 election, it took four months of negotiations before a government could be appointed. Such a delay is unlikely this time, with the emergence to two distinct political blocs. These blocs do not signify a return to right and left as the dominating contest in Swedish politics, however, and there are big political differences within both coalitions. Indeed, the blocs were founded largely on the question of whether the far-right Sweden Democrats should be allowed to have an influence on the government or not. Four parties said no, four other parties said yes.
The “No to SD” bloc is led by the Social Democrats, who spent the election campaign triangulating the “Yes to SD” bloc in questions regarding migration and law and order, while being unable to articulate credible left economic policies since the bloc also included the neoliberal Centre party. This also made the differences between the possible government coalitions minimal. If the result stands, the conservative right can form a government, but will do so in the shadow of the Sweden Democrats becoming the second biggest party.
The Left party has attempted to break out of the shadow of the Social Democrats by going for a more classic social democratic profile, but in the end lost 1,4 % from the last election at the national level. The overarching strategy for the Left party’s election campaign was to gain ground in rustbelt rural areas, and this was not accomplished. The Left party gained two to three percent in each of the three biggest cities Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö – but this was not enough to offset the general decline.
The far right is the only winner
Summing up the previous election in 2018, we argued that “the grand narrative of the election is the decline of the two largest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, and the concurrent rise of the Sweden Democrats”. Unfortunately, this still holds true – even more so this time around. Some early votes, as well as votes from abroad, remain to be counted, but everything points to the rightwing conservative coalition winning by the slightest of margins. The Social Democrats gained 2,2 % from the last election while the Moderates lost – but these shifts say much less about the current situation than the rise of the Sweden Democrats to the position of the second biggest party in Sweden at 20,6 %.
The Right's Theme: Keep Sweden Swedish
The Sweden Democrats were formed in 1988 out of the “Keep Sweden Swedish” movement and was composed of explicitly racist and neo-Nazi groups uniting under a common banner. The Sweden Democrats have spent the years since 1988 cleaning up their act, but it still remains an almost single-issue, anti-immigration party, whose members continuously slip-up, forget the new communication plan put in place by the leadership, and write racist slurs under pseudonyms on the internet.
The past 8 years have seen a plethora of negotiations to form different minority constellations, particular one-off agreements to pass reforms, and the ever-looming threat of new elections or votes of no confidence. The Social Democrats have been the only party in government during the last year, after the Green party left government when the last budget vote saw the passing of the budget proposal from the conservative-right coalition composed by the Moderates, Liberals, and Christian Democrats. The Green party refused to govern on a budget proposal negotiated with the xenophobic Sweden Democrats and which entailed slashing climate reforms, so they promptly left government, while the Social Democrats stayed and governed on an opposition budget.
The Social Democrats response to declining voter share has been to try to entice one or two of the rightwing parties into coalitions, thereby undermining the ability of the Moderates to form a majority. The Centre party's disdain for the Sweden Democrats made them the likeliest candidate, but they are neoliberal on economic issues and have exacted a hefty price for their support. The only possible left coalition also needs the support of the Left party and the Greens. Centre party leader Annie Lööf has explicitly stated that she will never support a government with Left party ministers – or indeed even left policies. Meanwhile, Left party leader Nooshi Dadgostar has stated that their support is conditioned on being part of the government.
On the other side, the conservative-right bloc of the Moderates, Liberals, and Christian Democrats have now normalized cooperation with the Sweden Democrats, even though the other coalition partners maintain that the latter are still too immature to have ministers in the government. With the Sweden Democrats as the biggest party in the bloc, however, it will only be a matter of time before they claim ministers. The Sweden Democrats will probably demand reforms first, rather than ministerial roles, while they train their cadre with presence in councils and committees.
Two unstable coalitions
This election campaign has been a continuous exposition of unsuccessful populism, with the Social Democrats trying to win over right-leaning voters by promising to restrict migration, be tough on crime, increase military spending, accommodate business interests and not put forward any major tax reforms. The conservative right’s campaign was not much different, so the election largely centered on the credibility of the party leaders and their personal ability to form a government and “lead Sweden”. With both coalitions being relatively loose, there was plenty of room for maneuvering and populist proposals by the individual parties – it didn’t matter if they were internally contradictory, as any necessary accommodations could take place after the election. This dynamic has evidently been most successful for the Sweden Democrats.
After the previous election, a cordon sanitaire against the Sweden Democrats was formalized in the “January Agreement”, where the Social Democrats could rule with the support of the Greens, Liberals and Centre party and with the toleration of the Left party. This agreement came with 73 concrete reforms – with a strong right-leaning profile – but was only partly carried out. In 2021 the Left party called for a vote of no confidence in the government to stop a policy set to replace negotiated rents with market rents in the housing sector.
This meant the collapse of the January Agreement and, in quick succession, the cordon sanitaire was broken and the Moderates, the Christian Democrats, and – most recently – the Liberals started openly cooperating with the Sweden Democrats. Now these parties are aiming to form a government whose shared solutions to the biggest policy challenges outside of crime and migration still remain unclear.
Major issues
The Russian invasion of Ukraine initiated a rapid change in the 200-year-old military non-alignment policy and, within a few weeks of the war’s opening shots, Sweden had applied for membership in NATO. Turkey´s autocratic leader Erdogan sensed an opportunity and listed his demands to allow Sweden’s entry, including the extradition of 33 mainly Kurdish residents of Sweden, as well as an end to any support for the YPG troops in Syria.
Social Democrat foreign minister Ann Linde had just a few months earlier declared the YPG to be heroes for their struggle against ISIS, yet the same foreign minister was soon negotiating terms with Turkey. Old friends are now left to fend for themselves, Kurds are to be extradited to torture, and only the Left party is still able to criticize Turkey’s abuse of human rights – but the Social Democrats succeeded in removing the issue of joining NATO from the election campaign in just a few swift moves.
The question of crime has been one of the major issues of the election. For the first time ever in Sweden, voters have rated crime “most important issue” in polls. The facts tell quite different stories, depending on which ones you choose to focus on. On the one hand, lethal violence in Sweden has been constant for several decades and is now actually slightly lower than in the 80s and 90s.
However, the last few years have also seen a large increase in gun violence and deaths between warring gangs in the major cities. Even though these are mainly internal disputes of a few hundred people, the resulting shootouts have taken place in public spaces and has spread a general mood of fear and impending chaos, fed by tabloids and right-wing pundits and more often than not seen as a consequence of “unrestrained” immigration. ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Streets blocked by the protest in Tehran - AP
Iran: Protest Cities Are Multiplying... And The Dead So Far: 31
Internet slowed down, and apps blocked. Mobilization everywhere: "No to the turban, yes to freedom". Mahsa's father challenges the authorities and talks to the BBC: "They don't show me his body"
By Farian Sabahi
Il Manifesto
"No to the headscarf, no to the turban, yes to freedom and equality!" It is one of the slogans of the protesters throughout Iran protesting the killing of Mahsa Amini, who was stopped by the moral police on Tuesday 13 September, and died last Friday after three days in a coma.
THE DISAPPEARANCE of Mahsa sparked protests in over twenty cities of Iran: triggered in the eastern province of Kurdistan, they arrived in the capital Tehran to spread to the south of the country in Bandar Abbas, in the center of Isfahan and in the holy city of Mashad, in East.
Those taking place in Iran are the most significant protests after those of November 2019, motivated by the increase in the price of fuel. Today, differently, there is a presence at the forefront of many women. In these six days of protests, according to the Iranian authorities, the dead are at least 17. According to the NGO Iran Human Rights based in Oslo, the civilians killed by the security forces are at least 31. Numerous were injured, and a thousand people were arrested. Among these, the photographers Niloufar Hamedi of the reformer newspaper Shargh, and Yalda Moayeri, who works for the local media.
The news is the interview with Amjad Amini, Mahsa's father, at the BBC's Persian-language service: «I was not allowed to see my daughter's body or even read the autopsy. I got a glimpse of her face and feet as we buried her. Her feet were scarred with wounds. Mahsa was in excellent health. Witnesses told me that she was beaten by the police.'
BBC Persian is the broadcaster most disliked by Tehran's leadership because it gives voice - in its original language - to the opposition abroad and is a very popular channel within the country. In a desperate attempt to reduce the spread of news, the authorities have slowed down the internet and blocked access to Instagram and WhatsApp.
AMINI WOULD HAVE turned twenty-three two days ago. She lived in the northwestern city of Saghez in Iranian Kurdistan. She had arrived in the capital for a few days of vacation, with her family. After that, she would go home to study at the university. "Microbiology, she wanted to be a doctor," her father told the BBC. She had been stopped by the moral police because her dress did not comply with the strict code of the Islamic Republic.
Authorities deny she was beaten and claim she suffered a sudden heart attack. At first, Mehdi Faruzesh, general director of Forensic Medicine in the province of Tehran, had declared that "there are no signs of wounds on the head and face, there are no scratches around the eyes, and not even fractures at the base of the skull."
AUTHORITIES also denied that there were injuries to internal organs. The director of Forensic Medicine added that the girl had undergone brain surgery at the age of eight. A detail that both Mahsa's family and schoolmates, joined by the BBC, firmly denied.
In these decades of repression against the families of those detained and killed, not necessarily activists, the Iranian judiciary has always said to be silent so as not to run into further trouble. Now to testify that Mahsa was beaten is also her brother Kiarash, 17, who was with her. Other people reported that the girl was beaten inside the van and later in the police station.
"MY SON begged that Mahsa not be taken away, but they blamed him too, his clothes were torn apart." In Iran, the police are equipped with cameras, but that day "the batteries were flat". Regarding Mahsa's clothing, her father claims that she "was dressed appropriately, with the long coat over her pants." ...Read More
|
|
New Journals and Books for Radical Education... |
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
Revolutionary Youth and the
New Working Class
The Praxis Papers,
the Port authority Statement, the RYM Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS
Edited by Carl Davidson
A Collection of 12 essays featuring some of the most creative and controversial work of
the U.S. New Left
of the late 1960s.
Most items are difficult to find, and in one important case, The Port Authority Statement, written in 1967 to replace the Port Huron Statement, appears here for the first time. Important for today's radical youth.
|
|
NOT TO BE MISSED: Short Links To Longer Reads... |
|
Photo: Keisha Richardson, 15-year Kellogg employee, waves to cars honking as they pass by as she gathers with union workers from Kellogg's while they picketed outside the cereal maker's headquarters last year. REUTERS/Emily Elconin/File Photo
Workers Are Getting Bolder
The Number Of Strikes Tripled From Last Year As Americans See Their Wages Shrink And Bosses Profit
By Jason Lalljee and
Juliana Kaplan
Business Insider
Sep 17, 2022 - More workers have gone on strike in the first half of 2022 than in all of 2021.
According to Cornell University's School of Industrial Labor Relations, the number of picketers has tripled.
Over the past year, workers have leveraged newfound bargaining power to demand more.
Inflation woes and increased bargaining power have created a perfect storm of conditions for workers, who have joined picket lines in increasing numbers since the pandemic began.
That's according to a labor action tracker created by researchers at Cornell University's School of Industrial Labor Relations, which tallied 180 strikes involving about 78,000 workers in the first half of 2022. That's in comparison to 102 strikes last year, with about 26,500 workers.
In short, more workers have gone on strike in 2022 than in 2021 — and that's still with six months of data left to track. It comes as the National Labor Relations Board sees both an uptick in union representation petitions and unfair labor practice charges.
Post-vaccine 2021 into 2022 has marked an uptick in organizing and increasing pushback from workers on the previous status quo. Many found the realities of their work laid bare during the pandemic, or suddenly made essential, and took matters into their own hands, whether through unionizing or just up and quitting. That all came against the backdrop of companies raking in their highest corporate profits in over 70 years.
Many workers also saw contract negotiations stalled by the pandemic, as was the case with unionized railroad workers, who threatened to strike just this week over better working conditions and benefits, such as sick leave. They reached an agreement with railroad companies, avoiding the immediate possibility of strikes that could have crippled the US economy.
In general, Americans haven't been this pro-union in nearly 60 years, according to a recent Gallup poll. Workers at companies like Starbucks, Trader Joe's, and Amazon are seeing historic union wins.
Several factors are likely responsible: the Great Resignation caused workers to reconsider their relationship with their jobs, and seek out better pay and working conditions. Organizing workers are also frequently citing inflation as a reason to strike, as they fight for wages to stay above the growing cost of living. On top of all of that, workers are experiencing the scales tipping just a little bit more towards them for the moment — and they're seizing that opportunity to ask for more.
"From when President Biden's taken office, we're seeing more interest in people organizing to join unions," US Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh told Insider in August.
Inflation is influencing worker strikes globally
According to a survey of 5,000 companies done by compensation analysis company Payscale, 92% of companies gave pay increases in 2022, up 7% from 2021 and 25% from 2020. But 85% of the businesses said they were worried about inflation cutting into wage increases.
And it did — the hot labor market gave workers rare bargaining power as companies became desperate to fill open roles, leading to those wage increases across industries, but only outpacing inflation in a select few. At the same time, workers saw CEO pay rise well above theirs — even as they kept firms going during the thick of the pandemic. That helped propel last fall's Striketober, which saw thousands of workers go on strike. job....Read More
|
|
Patterns in the Introduction and Passage of Restrictive Voting Bills are Best Explained by Race
White racial resentment — and not just party and competitiveness alone — goes a long way toward explaining where restrictive voting laws were introduced and passed in 2021.
By Kevin Morris
BrennanCenter.org
Aug 3, 2022 - Over the past 18 months, there has been an unprecedented wave of anti-voter legislation introduced and passed across the country. In 2021, at least one bill with a provision restricting access to voting was introduced in the legislature of every state except Vermont. By early May of this year, nearly 400 restrictive bills had been introduced in legislatures nationwide.
Legislators and researchers have given different explanations for this wave. The mostly Republican lawmakers supporting these bills often argue that the new provisions are necessary to protect election integrity, despite the absence of widespread fraud in American elections. Commentators argue that Republican legislators are pushing to change election laws to guarantee political advantages for their party. Some past research supports this argument, demonstrating that certain restrictive voting policies are most likely to be adopted in electorally competitive states controlled by Republicans. Other scholarship shows that states pass restrictive voting laws when Americans of color have strong and growing political power.
The Brennan Center has developed a unique data set for testing these explanations. Specifically, we tracked every restrictive voting provision introduced in every state legislature in 2021 (as we do every year) and used Legiscan data to identify the sponsors of these bills. We then examine which district-level characteristics are most correlated with whether a lawmaker sponsored a restrictive voting bill.
We tested several factors, including the partisan and racial makeup of legislative districts and states as well as the racial opinions of constituents. Our research shows that racial factors were powerful predictors of sponsorship. This is consistent with the theory that “racial backlash” — a theory describing how white Americans respond to a perceived erosion of power and status by undermining the political opportunities of minorities — is driving this surge of restrictive legislation. To be sure, the data also confirm that partisanship is a powerful predictor of sponsorship. But even after accounting for racially polarized voting in the United States, we show that racial demographics are a powerful factor independent of party in determining where restrictive voting laws are introduced and passed.
To evaluate the impact that race has on sponsorship, we use two measurements. First, we look simply to the racial makeup of the districts represented by the bill sponsors and their home states. Second, we use responses to a survey called the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES). We leverage responses to two questions that have been used for years to measure what political scientists call “racial resentment.” footnote1_ia78ht31 It’s important to note that this measure does not and cannot identify whether, as the Brennan Center’s Ted Johnson explains, there’s “a racist bone in your body.”
Instead, it measures how white Americans think about the role of race in politics, and it is generally a good proxy — in the aggregate — for how racially conservative Americans are. These scores cannot be used to neatly rank each and every legislative district according to how “racist” it is. Rather, we argue that districts with higher racial resentment scores on the survey are generally more likely to feel threatened by America’s growing racial diversity. The fact that higher scores are associated with higher rates of sponsorship even after accounting for partisanship underscores the explanatory power of these questions. ...Read More
|
|
A Conversation* With Governor Desantis On His Trafficking-Immigrants-To-Martha's Vineyard Strategy
*Based On What He Has Said
By Robert Reich
https://robertreich.substack.com/
I’m against trafficking of migrants.
But luring unsuspecting people onto planes with lies about jobs, housing, and education awaiting them, and then depositing them onto an island off the coast of Massachusetts that’s totally unprepared to receive them, is a form of human trafficking.
The people you’re talking about aren’t American citizens. They have no rights.
Even if they’re not Americans, U.S. law prohibits kidnapping people and moving them across state lines.
I didn’t kidnap them. They’re here illegally!
You don’t know that. Under our laws, these people are entitled to a hearing on whether they’re here legally — just like all the Cuban asylum seekers who for years have arrived in South Florida fleeing communism.
What I’m doing is appropriate and legal! I’m paying for part of it with funds from last year’s American Rescue Plan.
That money was for the COVID-19 health crisis. It isn’t a slush fund for whatever political stunt you dream up.
I’m also using every penny of the $12 million Florida budgeted to relocate migrants. I have a responsibility to the people of Florida to send migrants out of the state!
If you’re responsible for Floridians, why are you picking up people in Texas and transporting them to Massachusetts?
Many of the people who cross the southern border into Texas end up in Florida.
But the law gives federal officials the responsibility for handling immigration, not you.
You don’t know the Constitution. Article 10 gives powers not delegated to the federal government to the States.
No Governor, you don’t know the Constitution. Article 1 gives Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states. Neither you nor the state of Florida has the authority to off-load people you don’t want onto other states.
I’m not the only governor doing this!
I know. On Thursday Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent two surprise buses of migrants to Washington, D.C., where they were dropped off near the residence of Vice President Harris carrying all they have in clear plastic trash bags.
And we red-state governors are going to do a lot more!
So Republican governors can’t be bothered with pesky things like laws or the Constitution?
The U.S. immigration and asylum systems are totally broken!
Then why don’t you support fixing them instead of using immigrants as political fodder? Ask Republicans in Congress to stop blocking federal legislation creating paths to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants and to expedite asylum seekers and other legal immigrants.
You don’t understand politics. You have to play hardball.
You don’t understand morality or decency. You’re treating immigrants as if they’re political pawns rather than people. They’re no less people than was your maternal great-great-grandfather Salvatore Storti, who immigrated to the United States from Italy in 1904, or your great-great-grandmother Luigia Colucci, who joined Salvatore in the United States in 1917.
Keep them out of this.
|
|
From the CCDS Socialist Education Project... |
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
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 :
|
|
|
|
This New Wind Turbine Concept Isn’t Like Any We’ve Seen Before
A Norwegian startup claims that its strange wind turbine design will be able to produce more than double the electricity of the largest unit on the planet. But first they have to test it.
By Jesus Diaz
Fast Company
Sept 20, 2022 - The type of wind turbine you’re used to seeing in stock photos of wind farms is called a horizontal axis wind turbine (or, HAWT). But there is another form of wind power, called a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT), in which the blades rotate on an axis perpendicular to Earth’s surface. This type of turbine can work better in unstable wind conditions because they don’t need to be pointed into the wind, but still produce much less electricity and durability problems because of the force the wind exerts on them. That’s why you would only see VAWTs in small applications, like homes, and HAWTs in wind power farms.
But a new company claims to have improved on the VAWT design. The invention could create a turbine with a maximum output of 40 megawatts, far surpassing the 15 megawatts of the world’s current largest turbine. That company is called World Wide Wind, a Norwegian startup. The Norwegians—rich, thanks to their oil and gas reserves—want to dramatically increase their wind energy production to 30.000 megawatts by 2040. Their industry’s interest in offshore wind energy is so big that there is a waiting list to test new technologies off its coast, which is on the incredibly windy shores of the North Sea.
In June 2021, company founder Stian Valentin Knutsen wondered if it would be possible to have two sets of rotor blades on a single turbine mast, making them rotate in opposite directions. “The idea was to increase the energy output of the vertical turbines while simultaneously eliminating the increased torsional forces and the inherent problems associated with upscaling traditional HAWTs for increased energy outputs,” company spokesperson Elsbeth Tronstad told me via email. Knutsen looked for scientists to test the possibilities and finally met Hans Bernhoff, a professor at the department of electrical engineering at Uppsala University, in Sweden.
According to the company, Bernhoff had been doing research on vertical wind turbines for more than 20 years, building his own 200 kilowatt (kW), 131-foot-high vertical turbine that was functional for a decade. He was intrigued by Knutsen’s theoretical model and joined the company, developing the idea of the large tilted offshore floating turbine that World Wide Wind is now working on.
HOW IT WORKS
The concept of vertical axis turbines is not new, but the architecture of this machine—which the company says is patent pending—is radically different. The design employs two coaxial, or counter-rotating, rotors mounted on a vertical shaft.
Each rotor has three blades that sweep in an inverted conical area thanks to its V-shape (which remind me of the arms of a mechanical tree). The upper turbine is connected to an inner shaft that serves as the rotor in the electric generator. The lower turbine acts as the stator, the part of the generator that contains the coils and remains static in most generators. In this case, however, the stator moves on the opposite side of the rotor. The result: It doubles the relative speed of the shafts and thus the electrical generating capacity of the system.
Their engineers point out that the generator is not at the top of the mast, like that of a conventional HAWT system. but at the base, next to the ballast and all the other electrical system components, including the cables that connect it to shore. The added weight contributes to the stability of the system, ensuring that the tower does not capsize no matter how much the ocean heaves. This design, they say, also makes it more resistant to the vibration that greatly affects the integrity of HAWT systems, especially under very strong wind conditions.
While an underwater generator sounds like a nightmare to maintain, Tronstad tells me this is no problem: “Its interior space is all dry and there is ample space for technicians to work inside.” She also says that the generator design is a direct-driven permanent-magnet synchronous generator, “which requires minimal, if any, service during operation,” thanks to its lack of gearbox and other wearable parts.
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?
Logically, the mast itself does not stand upright as in conventional towers. In fact, the mobility of the assembly to be able to operate at almost any angle is fundamental to its operation. “Bernhoff—who is also a proficient sailor—always wanted to design an offshore turbine that would work with the wind and not against it, like current offshore HAWT units do,” Tronstad says. The company claims that this machine automatically orients itself as the wind blows and absorbs its energy from any conceivable angle, always guaranteeing the highest possible performance.
Knutsen and Bernhoff also maintain that the counter-rotating rotors greatly decrease the turbulence typical of horizontal turbines. But, while Tronstad says that “the first turbine drive counter-rotating generator have been already tested” and they have simulated the large-scale generator design simulated with electromagnetic with full physics, plus hydrodynamic simulations of structure and wave interaction,” and other tests are currently underway, the company hasn’t built its first full-scale prototype yet to physically validate any of these simulations.
If their simulations and theories are true, however, it could result in some crazy machines. According to its inventors, this design can reach up to 1,312 feet in height to achieve up to 40 megawatts. The largest turbine on the planet right now is China’s 793-foot-tall MySE 16.0-242 china, which generates up to 16 megawatts using monstrous 387-foot blades.
But if World Wide Wind’s design works, we wouldn’t need to build at such a gargantuan scale in order to get more power per square mile than we currently achieve in an offshore wind farm. HAWT units require very large distances between them to avoid causing turbulence to each other; but World Wide Wind claims that its machines can be deployed in a higher density, thanks to the vertical design, thus increasing electric generation using much less space.
These are all bold claims. The company is confident it will achieve these objectives based on the current testing, and Knutsen seems to have some key support from Norwegian Energy Partners, an organization dedicated to the internationalization of the Norwegian energy companies. Still, as with any new bold innovation, it has to work in reality, not just in models; but any radical new idea that could have significant impact on the wind-energy industry and our planet is one worth developing and testing. And we might see, before too long, how the company can fulfill its promises: World Wide Wind says it will launch its first 3-megawatt model in 2026 and a 40-megawatt model in 2029. ...Read More
|
|
The US and China Play With Fire
By Michael T. Klare
Le Monde Diplomatique via Portside
September 22, 2022 - Long before the US House Speaker’s plane touched down on 2 August, relations between China and the United States had been on a downward spiral. The Biden administration had been working to encircle China with a network of hostile military alliances and China had stepped up its aggressive military maneuvers in the East and South China Seas.
Still, bilateral relations had not deteriorated to the point where it was impossible for leaders to discuss cooperation on climate change and other vital matters, as Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping did during their 28 July phone conversation.
Ever since the Carter administration established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1978, US officials have adhered (at least in public) to the One China principle, under which Washington acknowledges that Taiwan and the mainland are both parts of ‘one China’, although not necessarily parts of a single political entity. At the same time, the US is obliged under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 to provide the Taiwanese with defensive arms as needed and to regard any Chinese attempt to alter the island’s status by force as a matter of ‘grave concern’ — a stance known as ‘strategic ambiguity’ as it leaves open whether the US will actually intervene in such a situation.
These two precepts have helped maintain stability until now: the One China principle by suggesting an inherent bond between Taiwan and the mainland, thereby deterring a hasty Chinese move to seize the island; ‘strategic ambiguity’ by leaving both Taiwan and China uncertain as to the US response in the event of action by either.
Although US officials continue to profess adherence to both, top congressional and administration leaders have in recent months suggested a shift away from them toward a ‘One China, One Taiwan’ policy, along with ‘strategic clarity’ or an unambiguous commitment to intervene on Taiwan’s behalf should China invade. Biden himself has helped to fuel this move by declaring on several occasions that the US has a ‘commitment’ to defend Taiwan, even though that is not formal US policy. When asked by Anderson Cooper of CNN last autumn whether the US would defend Taiwan if attacked by China, Biden replied, ‘Yes, we have a commitment to do that’.
‘Public opinion can’t be defied’
Biden and other senior officials have also suggested a policy shift by seeking commitments from such allies as Australia, Japan and South Korea to assist US forces if they get involved in a war with China over Taiwan. On the congressional side, the process has been abetted by numerous high-level visits to Taiwan, strong bipartisan support for US arms transfers to the island, and plans to replace the Taiwan Relations Act with a new version that replaces ‘strategic ambiguity’ with a specific pledge to help defend Taiwan if attacked by China.
Chinese leaders have watched these moves with growing dismay. For the PRC leadership — and especially Xi Jinping, who is seeking a third five-year term as China’s paramount leader — reunifying Taiwan with the mainland has become the ultimate goal, a prerequisite for China’s rise to national ‘rejuvenation’. ‘Resolutely safeguarding China’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity is the firm will of the more than 1.4 billion Chinese people,’ Xi reportedly told Biden during their 28 July call. ‘The public opinion cannot be defied’.
Nancy Pelosi was aware of all this when she traveled to Taiwan, and knew her trip was bound to exacerbate the situation. Both Pentagon and White House officials warned her that a visit at this time would antagonize the PRC leadership and provoke a reaction. Yet she chose to go and ensured it would get maximum international attention. We can only assume that she had every intention of provoking China and accelerating the drive toward a One China, One Taiwan policy, with all the risks that entails.
It appears she has largely succeeded. Despite White House efforts to inform their Chinese counterparts about the separation of powers in the US political system, it has proved difficult for Beijing to accept that Pelosi was speaking for herself alone. For Beijing, her visit represented the culmination of a combined Congress/White House drive to repudiate the One China policy and commence the recognition of Taiwan as an independent state.
‘Taiwan question an internal affair’
The Biden administration has attempted damage limitation, insisting that there’s been no change in US policy, but these claims haven’t persuaded Beijing. Indeed, on 10 August, just a week after her visit, the State Council Information Office released a new white paper on the Taiwan Question reaffirming Beijing’s desire to achieve Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland by peaceful means, but warning it was prepared to employ military means to overcome any resistance by pro-independence forces in Taiwan or their foreign supporters.
‘We are ready to create vast space for peaceful reunification, but will leave no room for separatist activities of any form,’ the white paper states. ‘The Taiwan question is an internal affair that involves China’s core interests … and no external interference will be tolerated’.
Official statements of this sort have been accompanied by a series of military and diplomatic moves intended to demonstrate Beijing’s diminished tolerance for ‘external interference’ of the sort displayed by Pelosi and increased preparedness to blockade or invade Taiwan if it moves any further in the direction of independence.
As indications of this new stance, China has undertaken several worrying moves: on 4 August the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force fired 11 DF-15 ballistic missiles into waters northeast and southwest of Taiwan, suggesting an intent to blockade the island in the event of a future crisis or conflict. Five of the missiles are said to have landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, suggesting that any war over Taiwan would quickly expand to involve Japan, which hosts numerous US military bases.
On 6 August Chinese officials announced that they were canceling communications between the PLA and the US military aimed at avoiding an unintended clash between their respective air and sea forces, and suspending talks on such vital issues as climate change and global health. On 7 August state media outlets in China reported that the PLA will now conduct ‘regular’ military exercises on the eastern (Taiwan-facing) side of the median line of the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese have largely kept their forces on the western (China-facing) side of the line until now; by conducting regular exercises on the eastern side, they are increasing the psychological pressure on Taiwan and also testing their plans for a possible invasion.
Time to end the blame game
All of these moves have been denounced by US leaders as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘provocative’. ‘We should not hold hostage cooperation on matters of global concern because of differences between our two countries,’ Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted at a press conference in Manila on 6 August. ‘Others are rightly expecting us to continue to work on issues that matter to the lives and livelihood of their people as well as our own’.
There is considerable truth in Blinken’s remarks, but to blame the impasse entirely on China is misleading. Blinken has spent most of the past year trying to line up alliances aimed at containing China’s rise while issuing ultimatums to the Chinese leadership on domestic issues they cannot possibly satisfy, such as mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and political repression in Hong Kong. Yes, he’s also called for cooperation on climate change, but only as an afterthought. From China’s perspective, it’s Washington that is holding hostage cooperation on matters of global concern.
Isn’t it time to set aside the blame game and resume businesslike talks on measures that could reduce the risk of violent conflict? The US should promise to stop its warships transiting the Taiwan Strait, and Beijing should undertake to keep its forces on the western side of the median line. If we cannot go back to the pre-Pelosi-visit era, we must do everything we can to prevent these new conditions from erupting into war.
[Michael T Klare is professor emeritus of Hampshire College (Amherst, Massachusetts) and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington DC. He is the author, most recently of All Hell Breaking Loose: the Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2019.]
Copyright ©2022 Le Monde diplomatique — distributed by Agence Global ...Read More
|
|
CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
Remember Us for Gift Giving and Study Groups
We are a small publisher of books with big ideas. We specialize in works that show us how a better world is possible and needed. Click Gramsci below for our list.
|
|
This Week's History Lesson:
The Little-Known Story of the Women Who Stood
Up to General Motors and Demanded Equal Pay
|
|
In the 1930s, Florence St. John and her co-workers at an automotive plant won a hard-fought victory for fairness
By Martin J. Kernan
The Smithsonian
October 2022 - By 1938, there wasn't a job Florence St. John hadn’t done in the raucous Sheet Metal Department at the Olds Motor Works in Lansing, Michigan, where around 300 workers at 70 or so behemoth machines punched, drilled, welded and riveted Oldsmobile parts.
St. John stepped onto the factory floor for the first time in 1928, joining around 30 other women in the overwhelmingly male trade. The 32-year-old mother of three worked elbow-to-elbow with the men, levering heavy presses to bend and cut steel. In the 1930s, managers at the Olds Motor Works, a division of General Motors, treated St. John and other women the same as men in nearly all but one respect: pay.
Women of the Olds Motor Works in Lansing, Michigan, 1939, including at least three who transferred their legal claims to St. John, enabling the landmark case. MyHeritage
St. John first discovered a pay disparity during games of “check pool”—a form of poker that the workers played with their paychecks to entertain themselves on the factory floor. Time after time, St. John and the other women noticed a pattern: Men on the same shifts with similar jobs and less seniority, some of whom the women had trained, appeared to be making more. This curious game of chance would eventually tip the scales at trial and result in the first major damages award in a job discrimination case in U.S. history—a critical but largely forgotten struggle that inspired women and legislatures across the country to take up the cause of equal pay.
Lower pay didn’t mean lighter loads for the women, who among other duties had to drag around huge pans full of car parts weighing up to 200 pounds, often without assistance. If they didn’t meet strictly enforced quotas, the men and women knew they would lose their jobs. In the heavy press room, St. John worked with women, including her friend Merreta Cobb, and men, as the workers wrenched together strips of steel to make an elaborate part called a harmonic balancer—a sturdy five-pound disc that absorbs vibrations that would otherwise damage the engine. In assembling the balancers, the women were themselves equal to men in strength, skill and grit, as attested by their male co-workers. There was a sense they were all in it together.
Check pool eroded this sense by revealing that GM paid men $15 to $20 more per pay period. In late 1936, as strikes erupted at GM plants in nearby Flint, Michigan, in response to poor working conditions and hundreds of worker deaths, St. John began urging Forrest Brown, her co-worker and a union representative, to help the women close the pay gap. Brown repeatedly confronted GM managers with an obscure criminal law, Michigan Penal Code No. 328, Section 556, that made it a misdemeanor to “discriminate in any way in the payment of wages as between sexes.” But GM wouldn’t budge, with one manager telling Brown if it were up to him, he wouldn’t have any women working in his department.
When Brown took a position with the Michigan Department of Labor and Industry the following year, he investigated the Olds Motor Works for violation of the statute. By then, GM, in an attempt to comply with the statute, had parked St. John and others in a newly created “Women’s Division,” where they ostensibly did lower-skilled work like sorting bolts, but where they still found themselves bound to do more intensive jobs, such as making harmonic balancers. Most of the women bridled at the segregated arrangement and the continued low pay—76 cents an hour to a comparably skilled man’s 97 cents—and many women quit.
For reasons that aren’t clear, Brown dropped the investigation. At trial, St. John recalled the moment as a crucial turning point in rallying her fellow workers at meetings in their homes. In March 1938 they decided, as St. John put it, “to see Mr. Pierce”—that is, Barnard Pierce, a prominent, civic-minded Lansing lawyer.
A 1928 advertisement for Joseph W. Planck’s campaign to become prosecuting attorney for Ingham County, Michigan. The Ingham County News
Pierce and his partner, Joseph Planck, had made headlines in the local papers as successful trial lawyers but weren’t known as civil rights specialists. Nonetheless, the pair devised a legal maneuver to transfer 28 other women’s claims to St. John, then filed a lawsuit that prefigured modern class actions. Thus, on April 7, 1938, St. John took the unprecedented step of suing GM on her own behalf and that of her women co-workers for back pay. Never, it appears, had any group of women banded together in this fashion and demanded damages for lost wages. GM answered by pre-emptively attacking the constitutionality of the Michigan law upon which St. John’s case now hinged. An ensuing three-year legal battle culminated in the decision by the Michigan Supreme Court to uphold the 20-year-old statute, which no one had ever sought to enforce until then. Having ruled that St. John and company had standing for their suit, the high court sent the case to the Ingham County Circuit Court for trial, where the burden was on St. John to prove there was a pay disparity. ...Read More
|
|
These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!
Powerful stories, wonderful gifts.
As they stand up, slow down, form unions, leave an abusive relationship or just stir up good trouble, the characters in this multi-generation novel entertain and enlighten, make us laugh and rage, and encourage us to love deeply, that we may continue the fight for justice.
"So much fiction is about escape and fantasy, but these powerful Tales of Struggle will enrich our real and daily lives." ─ Gloria Steinem
“What a wonderful story of class, class struggle and regular people. The story is about struggle and change, but also about joy and humor. Great work! ─ Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of Solidarity Divided
Price: $15.00
|
|
Amazing Worldwide
Internet Radio:
Put your speakers on, rotate, zoom in, pick a station, anywhere in the world, any time, live, native languages and many English stations as well, thousands of them
Copy this link: http://radio.garden/visit/santa-cruz-da-graciosa/MDu6eLeE
|
|
Prison to Detention: Frying Pan to Fire
WEEKLY BULLETIN OF THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY PROJECT
from the Sept 22, 2022 Bulletin
|
|
Many of us, for reasons ranging from demonstrating and drugs to DUIs, have found ourselves arrested and incarcerated, usually when we’re young. Count two of our interviewees this week, Pedro and Gustavo, as part of this crowd.
Most of us, after finishing off our allotted time, can leave prison behind and go back to our loved ones. But for those too young to know they were crossing any legal boundaries when their parents carried them into the US, it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, better known as ICE, usually only imposes detention on people considered a threat to public safety or a flight risk. Pedro and Gustavo had proven to be neither. Both had participated in the California state prison system’s firefighter program. That system’s officials had given Pedro and Gustavo chainsaws and sent them out to work in public. You don’t let public menaces do that!
And yet none of that positive firefighting behavior mattered to ICE. The agency transferred Pedro and Gustavo straight from prison into ICE detention centers.
Hospitals treating an undocumented patient do not have to discharge that person into a detention center. Schools do not interface with ICE. And yet prisons do. Why? Ending a prison sentence should be a moment of hope and renewal. Do we want our society to encourage redemption — or despair? ...Read More
|
|
|
Our Amazing Resource for Radical Education
From the settlers to the present, and how its consciousness is conflicted. Prepared by Carl Davidson and Rebecca Tarlau,
with some help from the DSA Rust Belt group.
|
There are hundreds of video courses here, along with study guides, downloadable books and links to hundreds of other resources for study groups or individuals.
Nearly 10,000 people have signed on to the OUL for daily update, and more than 150,000 have visited us at least once.
Karl Marx's ideas are a common touchstone for many people working for change. His historical materialism, his many contributions to political economy and class analysis, all continue to serve his core values--the self-emancipation of the working class and a vision of a classless society. There are naturally many trends in Marxism that have developed over the years, and new ones are on the rise today. All of them and others who want to see this project succeed are welcome here.
|
|
|
|
Video for Learning: Kim Stanley Robinson: 'Writing the Future Story People Want' 26 min
|
|
Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical' |
This week's topic:
Click the picture to access the blog.
|
|
Tune of the Week: Willie Nelson & Bob Dylan - 'Pancho and Lefty' ... 5 minutes
|
|
Film Review: 'The Banger Sisters' Bittersweet
Legacy Is That of Second-Wave Feminism
|
By B.L. Panther
Paste Magazine
Sept 20, 2022 - “Jim Morrison is a ghost, and so are you,” a young disgruntled suit barks at Suzette (Goldie Hawn) in the back hallway of Whisky a Go Go. Once an infamous barmaid of the celebrated L.A. music club, Suzette is having trouble with this new management. He disapproves of her beatnik shades, low-cut tanks and loose approach to work. She tries to convince him that she’s the spirit of the place and the last to remember a bygone era, but this manager couldn’t care less. He has a younger, edgier clientele to cater to.
Suzette sits alone in her Boho-chic apartment, looking through old photos, without a job but with a mountain of debt. She remembers the fabulous days of 1970s rock ‘n’ roll when she and her best friend Vin, or Vinnie, were “The Banger Sisters,” wild groupies posing on a “War Is Over” billboard. Sans any other direction in her life, Suzette sets out on a road trip to Phoenix to reconnect with her old accomplice and maybe ask for a bit of money.
In his review of writer/director Bob Dolman’s debut feature, The Banger Sisters, Roger Ebert called the film “pretty thin” while adding, “but you grin while you watch it.” The grin is still there 20 years later, but time has filled out the film. The vanishing ‘70s are even more remote. The upstart management is now fully part of the establishment. Watching The Banger Sisters today, we can forgive some of the script’s shortcomings for its stellar performances and what it captures about the changing history of second-wave feminism at the turn of the new millennium.
The script is deceptively simple. It’s the classic “worlds collide” plot when Suzette finally sees Vin (Susan Sarandon), and the pair realize how opposite they’ve become. Suzette is the carefree “flower,” while Vin is an uptight mom who now goes by her full name Lavinia and dresses “the same shade as the department of motor vehicles.” And it works, because Hawn and Sarandon are just fucking killer, man.
Hawn sets the tone right off the bat. She embodies the hip chick who keeps things cool. She’s always in controlled flight, drifting, with effortless humor and gentleness, through each scene. Suzette is the film’s muse that keeps the narrative flowing and easy-going.
Then she meets the immovable earthly force of Sarandon. Her Lavinia is a tightly wound coil, kept in check by bourgeois trappings. Sarandon brilliantly finds moments for Lavinia to tighten herself up even further with a twinkle in her eye. This gives her a great starting point because Lavinia is the character who changes the most. At first, she seems complete in herself, but the veneer starts to fall away. “I’ve lost me,” she confesses to herself and her family. She’s been so busy being a wife, mom or charity volunteer that she’s forgotten who she is. To find out, she has to reconnect with who she was.
What makes The Banger Sisters interesting is its use of “the groupie.” These semi-mythical figures are from a particular moment in the 1970s when sexual liberation, free love, road culture and rock music seemed to coalesce in primarily young white women. The ideal figure of the groupie was that of a fan, muse, lover and confidant—all rolled into one. We know the lifestyle wasn’t as cheery as Suzette tells us through literal rose-colored glasses. (Rent Almost Famous and ask her daughter, Kate Hudson, about the darker side of groupiedom.)
Nevertheless, Dolman uses the image of the groupie to ground Suzette and Vin in a period of history—one which Hawn and Sarandon know intimately. (Hawn got her start in the late 1960s as a dancer at Whisky a Go Go.) No matter how many years go by, because of the groupie, The Banger Sisters will always comment on not just the American 1970s but also “how far we’ve come” since then. The Banger Sisters poignantly charts the history of this cruel optimism. In her most optimistic or naïve form, the groupie embodies many midcentury hopes. They represented a free sexual culture unburdened by old-school regulations or repressions. But the groupie also illustrates the disappointments of its age. The groupies’ disappearance from popular culture parallels the failure of those hopes to materialize. It may have been difficult to notice in 2002, but in 2022, we have the privilege of double vision. We can see where 2002 sets itself apart from the 1970s and how we, in 2022, look at the early 2000s. It’s this extra distance that reveals the film’s hidden depths.
Without intending to, these characters represent different trajectories of second-wave feminism. Suzette clung to the central ideas of personal liberty, bodily autonomy and sexual self-ownership, which got her laid but in debt. Suzette’s life and debt arise because of the social dismissal of these sexually free women as they mature, especially if they were lower class. The spirit of feminism she believed in failed to provide for her materially.
On the other hand, Lavinia sacrificed these ideas so that she could “have it all.” She may have a pool, a “kid’s wing” and a banana hammock, but all the material comforts have left her spiritually vacant. Lavinia had to give up so much to fit in with the politics and business around her that she abandoned her sense of rebellion. She follows the reformist path of feminism that took to capitalism, hoping to change it from the inside only to find herself the one changed.
Both sides need each other. Over the course of a night out, Lavinia learns to let go. When she and Suzette end up stoned in the basement, looking at photos of penises past, the pair realizes the fun and importance of youthful freedom and how much they mean to each other. The film’s lesson comes to us through the valedictorian speech given by Lavinia’s eldest daughter, Hannah (Erika Christensen). She and her sister Ginger (Eva Amurri, Sarandon’s actual daughter) have struggled to find footing under the mom’s iron heel. After learning from Suzette’s presence and her mother’s experiences, Hannah gives us a resoundingly early 2000s bit of advice: “Don’t be fake.”
This message not only heals Lavinia, but changes the men. Ebert remarks that the men in The Banger Sisters are underwritten, but it’s because the men are more metaphors than meaningful. Both are caricatures of the masculinities that prevent the dreams of second-wave feminism from fully blooming. Harry (Geoffrey Rush), the agoraphobic, fastidious writer with a death wish that Suzette picks up in the desert, needs to exert control and dominance over every space. He disrupts all of Suzette’s attempts to relax. Lavinia’s husband Raymond (Robin Thomas) is the controlling conservative “head of the family” behind whom all others must fall in line. Even he realizes that he hasn’t been seeing the “real” Lavinia or living a picture-perfect life.
At the beginning of this century, with the Y2K bug in the air and simulacrums simulating all over, “the authentic” became the stand-in word for truthful reality. The groupie, and her music, become a quaint link to an outmoded analog world. For the early 2000s, the authentic was that place out of the reach of the digital. It was the thing that could not be captured and commodified. In The Banger Sisters, embracing one’s true unregulated self is also the key to the acceptance of others. For white progressives of the time, feminist history ends once the gendered self is reintegrated and accepted within society.
But this only works for Lavinia. She has her family, her money and her identity. But as Suzette heads out on the open road with Harry, the resolution is incomplete. The anti-war sentiment of “War is Over” has been replaced with an advertisement. And we think back to when the sisterhood of The Banger Sisters came full circle, and the pair climbed another billboard to prove they still had a rebellious streak. The sign comes into full view as the camera glides back from Hawn and Sarandon perched on edge.
“Got Milk?” it reads in the iconic black-on-white campaign. At first, it seems to be a comment about pre-menopausal women, or perhaps on women and commercialism. Still, the longer the camera holds, the slogan turns back into a grammatical question. Now that we’ve seemingly closed up loose ends, it asks, “Is there more?”
The solution seems to be in a third, unknown way forward. One that takes the ideological lessons learned and gives them material praxis. In 2002, Suzette driving off with Harry into the sunset had a corny sense of a happy ending, one that Ebert rightly points out isn’t earned. But now, 20 years on, The Banger Sisters has a salty bittersweetness. As the credits roll, we’re left to wonder: Who will take care of the wild ones like Suzette, the free spirits with bad credit? The road becomes open-ended, a prescient suggestion that there’s more to the journey, more to herstory.
B.L. Panther is a culture writer, scholar and Pisces from Northern Illinois. B! writes for outlets such as Honey Literary Journal and The Spool, where they’re also the cohost of The Method Podcast discussing great actors in less-than-great films. A champion hermit, they enjoy reading, the indoors, afternoon naps and doing nothing at all. ...Read More
|
|
Book Review:
‘A New Way Of Life’: The Marxist, Post-Capitalist, Green Manifesto Captivating Japan
Kohei Saito’s book Capital in the Anthropocene has become an unlikely hit among young people and is about to be translated into English
By Justin McCurry in Tokyo
The Guardian
Sept 9, 2022 - The climate crisis will spiral out of control unless the world applies “emergency brakes” to capitalism and devises a “new way of living”, according to a Japanese academic whose book on Marxism and the environment has become a surprise bestseller.
The message from Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, is simple: capitalism’s demand for unlimited profits is destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth.
In practical terms, that means an end to mass production and the mass consumption of wasteful goods such as fast fashion. In Capital in the Anthropocene, Saito also advocates decarbonization through shorter working hours and prioritizing essential “labor-intensive” work such as caregiving.
‘I was as surprised as everyone else’
Few would have expected Saito’s Japanese-language solution to the climate crisis to have much appeal outside leftwing academia and politics. Instead, the book – which was inspired by Karl Marx’s writings on the environment – has become an unlikely hit, selling more than half a million copies since it was published in September 2020.
As the world confronts more evidence of the effects of climate change – from floods in Pakistan to heatwaves in Britain – rampant inflation and the energy crisis, Saito’s vision of a more sustainable, post-capitalist world will appear in an academic text to be published next year by Cambridge University Press, with an English translation of his bestseller to follow.
“It is broadly about what’s going on in the world … about the climate crisis and what we should do about it,” Saito said in an interview with the Guardian. “I advocate for degrowth and going beyond capitalism.”
Biden says Maga Republicans ‘don’t have a clue’ about the power of American women – live
The mere mention of the world degrowth conjures negative images of wealthy societies plunged into a dark age of shrinking economies and declining living standards. Saito admits that he thought a book that draws on strands of Marxism as a solution to modern-day ills would be a tough sell in Japan, where the same conservative party has dominated politics for the best part of 70 years.
“People accuse me of wanting to go back to the [feudal] Edo period [1603-1868] … and I think the same sort of image persists in the UK and the US,” he said. “Against that background, for the book to sell over 500,000 copies is astonishing. I was as surprised as everyone else.”
The 35-year-old needn’t have worried about using the language of radical change; as the world emerges from the pandemic and confronts the existential threat posed by global heating, disillusionment with the economic status quo has given him a receptive audience.
The pandemic has magnified inequalities in advanced economies, and between the global north and south – and the book struck a nerve with younger Japanese.
Saito’s academic text, Marx in the Anthropocene, will be published later this year, with an English translation of his bestseller to follow.
“Saito is telling a story that is easy to understand,” says Jun Shiota, a 31-year-old researcher who bought Capital in the Anthropocene soon after it was published. “He doesn’t say there are good and bad things about capitalism, or that it is possible to reform it … he just says we have to get rid of the entire system.
“Young people were badly affected by the pandemic and face other big issues such as environmental destruction and the cost of living crises, so that simple message resonates with them.”
Saito agrees that growing inequality has given his writing more immediacy. “Many people lost their jobs and homes and are relying on things like food banks, even in Japan. I find that shocking. And you have essential workers who are forced to work long hours in low-paid jobs. The marginalisation of essential workers is becoming a serious issue.”
The response to Covid-19 had shown that rapid change is not only desirable, but possible, he says.
“One thing that we have learned during the pandemic is that we can dramatically change our way of life overnight – look at the way we started working from home, bought fewer things, flew and ate out less. We proved that working less was friendlier to the environment and gave people a better life. But now capitalism is trying to bring us back to a ‘normal’ way of life.”
Saito is deeply sceptical of some widely accepted strategies for tackling the climate emergency. “In my book, I start a sentence by describing sustainable development goals [SDGs] as the new opium of the masses,” he said in reference to Marx’s view of religion.
“Buying eco bags and bottles without changing anything about the economic system … SDGs mask the systemic problem and reduce everything to the responsibility of the individual, while obscuring the responsibility of corporations and politicians.”
“I discovered how Marx was interested in sustainability and how non-capitalist and pre-capitalist societies are sustainable, because they are realising the stationary economy, they are not growth-driven,” Saito said.
Since the book was released, Saito has made Japan noticeably less squeamish about the German philosopher’s ideas.
The conservative public broadcaster NHK gave him four 25-minute segments to explain his ideas for its Masterpiece in 100 Minutes series, while bookshop chains cleared space for special displays of revivalist Marxist literature.
Now he hopes his message will appeal to an English-language readership.
“We face a very difficult situation: the pandemic, poverty, climate change, the war in Ukraine, inflation … it is impossible to imagine a future in which we can grow the economy and at the same time live in a sustainable manner without fundamentally changing anything about our way of life. ...Read More
|
|
522 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-6637
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
:focal(400x301:401x302)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/5c/7a/5c7a1cbd-b136-4bd6-99ed-b89f6c845cd4/womens_pay.jpg)
