Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism |
|
March 22, 2024: The Week in Review
Trump vs Biden the UN on Gaza
|
|
How will Israel's war on Gaza affect our future?
It's widely acknowledged that President Biden's embrace of Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and Israel's massive and unrestricted war against Gaza has driven a wedge in the democratic coalition needed for the defeat of Trump. Biden, a Catholic, has called himself a Zionist of long standing.
What is less known is Biden's private messages to Bibi, warning him 'not to repeat our mistakes,' apparently meaning the U.S. military 'regime change' aggression's against Iraq and Afghanistan. It's clear that Bibi has ignored this advice, given the Israeli attacks on all of Gaza that have become genocidal.
Now Biden is calling for a ceasefire of sorts, a call made more clear in Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer's recent Senate speech. Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish-American U.S. officeholder, demanded an immediate ceasefire, massive aid to Gaza, and the removal of Netanyahu and his Likud party from Israeli's Knesset in favor of a government that could work with Palestinians for a 'two-state solution.' Biden called it 'a good speech,' despite Bibi's attack on it.
What's going on here? Any war or military assault on an entire population is bound to force all the latent contradictions within all concerned to rise to the surface. One divides into two, and even more than two. Zionism in Israel has many subdivisions. The Likud holds the 'one state, from the Sea to the River' position. This means driving all Palestinians into exile or 'transfer' as the polite term for ethnic cleansing. Any few remaining will be imprisoned or absorbed as 'Israeli Arabs' with second-class status in a Jewish theocracy. Israel has been doing this in slow motion ever since the Likud came to power soon after the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
Rabin was very much a military leader, both in wars against Arab states and in the repression of Palestinians. Politically, however, he was secular and part of the Israeli Zionist left, including the Mapam, a labor party. In the 1990s, he turned toward finding an agreement with Palestinians, starting 'the peace process' that ended in the 'Oslo Accords,' recognizing a start toward the formation of a Palestinian state. The result was the famous handshake with Yasir Arafat and the Nobel Peace Prize for both of them.
Immediately after Rabin's assassination, Labor's Shimon Perez held power for only six months, to be replaced by Netanyahu and the Likkud in 1996, a coalition that included Rabin's assassins. The Likud lasted three years, and the governing coalition see-sawed back and forth with a variety of labor, centrist and far-right groups. Netanyahu was elected two more times, the last in 2022 to the present.
Netanyahu's right-wing politics still holds a majority in Israel today. But the other Zionist trends have not gone away. Given Bibi's many failures leading up to Oct.7--backing Hamas against the PLO in the West Bank to keep Palestinians divided, and the inability of the IDF to respond promptly to the Hamas attack--and his indictments and pending trials for corruption, his support is dwindling rapidly.
The important point here is that the divisions among Zionists in Israel are also reflected among Israel's supporters in the U.S. political class. Schumer's speech represents an emerging center-left coalition in Israel that is likely to dump Bibi and try to start a new 'peace process' aiming at the much-touted 'two-state solution.'
Bibi's top U.S. defender is Donald Trump, who Bibi backs in our upcoming election. See our cartoon above. Together with Bibi, Trump denounced Schumer's position. Trump even went further, asserting that any U.S. Jew who voted Democrat should be 'ashamed' and were not really Jewish. Following Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to bring Bibi to address the House, to make the case against Biden, a ceasefire, and any positive prospects for Palestinians in their homeland.
This division matters a great deal. It not only spotlights Trump's reactionary views on both Israel/Palestine and Jews in the U.S. It also shows a Biden rupture with the Likud and the movement of the Democrats toward a position more in tune with the UN.
Summarizing the UN positions, China's representative to the UN, Zhang Jun, said that 'only a ceasefire can prevent greater civilian casualties in Gaza and prevent the conflict from spiraling out of control.' Noting that the international community has repeatedly and overwhelmingly called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, he said that 'Israel continues to bomb and shell schools, hospitals, mosques, churches and refugee camps.'
'Causing more civilian casualties in Gaza is not the solution for rescuing hostages,' Zhang added. 'Israel must immediately reverse its course of action and stop its indiscriminate military attacks and collective punishment against the people of Gaza. Every effort must be made to prevent the West Bank situation from spiraling out of control. In the West Bank, Israel must cease all settlement activities and effectively curb settler violence. China further calls for greater international and regional diplomatic efforts to reaffirm the parties’ commitment to a two-State solution.'
The U.S. movement for a ceasefire in Gaza and for self-determination for Palestine can find a tactical ally in Schumer and his speech and a strategic ally in the UN majority. Moreover, the broad common project to defeat Trump in November can use these developments to win back many Palestinian and other voters who chose 'none of the above' in the Democratic primaries. Watch closely, and work wisely on the matter.
|
|
|
|
 |
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!
Started in August 2022, then going forward every week.
It will be more of a hangout than a formal setting. We can review the news in the previous days' LeftLinks or add a new topic. We can invite guests or carry on with those who show up. We'll try to have a progressive stack keeper should we need one.
Most of all, we will try to be interesting and a good sounding board. If you have a point you would like to make or a guest to invite, send an email to Carl Davidson, carld717@gmail.com
Continuing weekly, 10:30 to Noon, EDT.
The Zoom link will also be available on our Facebook Page.
Meeting ID: 868 9706 5843
Let's see what happens!
|
CCDS 4th Monday:
LABOR RISING: A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE NEW FACES OF
THE LABOR MOVEMENT
Monday, March 25, 2024
9 p.m Eastern, 6 pm Pacific
Discussion will begin with commentaries by longtime progressive labor organizers and participants in efforts to organize among the “new working class.”
Panelists will include:
Paul Krehbiel, is the coordinator of Los Angeles Labor for Bernie, and national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
Frank Hammer. former President and Chairman of the United Auto Workers Local 909, which is located at the GM transmission plant in Detroit. He worked for GM for 32 years.
Laurie Davidson, Business Agent, Writers Guild East (WGAE) and former organizer with SEIU.
|
Yo, WE, the 52nd contingent of the Venceremos Brigade is excited to share with you all the brigade application. You can fill out the application at bit.ly/VB52application!
|
The Return of John Brown:
Abolitionist Comes Back
to Life in New Musical
The first show will debut on April 26 in Baltimore, followed by a show on April 27 in Washington, DC. The next weekend on May 4 and 5, the play will be featured at the Kennedy Farm, the Harpers Ferry location where John Brown staged his famous anti-slavery raid.
Director: Jayne LaMondue Price
Musical Director: Glenn Pearson
For more information email Returnofjohnbrown@gmail.com.
|
Seven Days in May (1964)
John Frankenheimer - director
Rod Serling - screenwriter
Burt Lancaster as General James Mattoon Scott
Kirk Douglas as Colonel Martin "Jiggs" Casey
Bill Fletcher: This is a brilliant film that has enduring relevance.
|
|
|
|
Campaigns, Movements, and Organzing Strategies
with Bill Fletcher Jr.
and Carl Davidson
|
Collecting the Hidden Soundtracks of the Great Depression
Tuesday, March 26 ·
8 - 9pm EDT
Music scholar Sheryl Kaskowitz is author of the forthcoming A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time, (Pegasus Books, April 2024) the story of the Resettlement Administration's Music Unit, a little-known program that laid the groundwork for a folk music revival that had a lasting impact on American culture.
Catherine Hiebert Kerst, who worked for many years as a Folklife Specialist and Archivist in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, is author of the forthcoming book, California Gold, Sidney Robertson and the WPA California Folk Music Project (UC Press, April 2024) about Sidney Robertson, whose fieldwork for the WPA documented the diverse musical culture of California.
|
Bernie Sanders: I am excited to announce that, this week, I am launching a new podcast. In it, we discuss my recent book, It's Ok to Be Angry about Capitalism.
If you'd like a copy of the book, you can make a contribution today — of $12 any amount you can afford —at berniesanders.com/book and we'll send it to you in the mail.
|
Classical Political Economy and Marx’s Critique:
Theories of Surplus-Value
Sat, March 23
@ 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
We are reading closely and discussing Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value (sometimes referred to as Volume 4 of Capital), supplemented by chapters from I.I. Rubin’s History of Economic Thought.
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants. To join, send email to
info@marxedproject.org
|
This featured story are reflections by labor and community activist Jeff Crosby, son of Harry Crosby, a prominent character in the Apple TV series “Masters of the Air.” The series depicts the courage of young men who risked, and often sacrificed, their lives to defeat fascism during World War II. The non-profit group Greater Lynn Senior Services (GLSS) interviewed Jeff about his father and his experience with the making of the series.
|
ANGELA DAVIS:
STANDING WITH PALESTINIANS
Reflecting on
the past 60 years.
The emotional turbulence so many of us have experienced for the past five months as we’ve witnessed the unprecedented damage the Israeli military has inflicted reminds me just how central the Palestinian quest for justice is to liberation struggles here in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, as well as to my own sense of self in our extremely complicated political world. ...Read More
|
The Quest for
Governing Power:
2024 Elections and Beyond
All sessions will take place
Wednesdays in March 2024
at 6:30pm - 8:30pm
CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies @CUNYSLU --All sessions will be held via Zoom.
Special Note for LeftLinks Readers:
March 27, 2024 -
6:30pm - 8:30pm (ET)
Session #4: "Re-Making Elections: New Rules for Winning" Guest speakers:
Maria Poblet - co-editor, Power Concedes Nothing; Executive Director, Grassroots Power Project
Max Elbaum - co-editor, Power Concedes Nothing; Member, Convergence Magazine editorial board
|
|
|
|
Last Week's Saturday Morning Coffee
|
|
News of the Week, Plus More
|
|
Photo: Trump supporters breaking into the Capitol in January of 2021 were part of the first but failed MAGA coup attempt. A second coup attempt is already underway, this time by MAGA forces determined not to repeat their failures of three years ago. | John Minchillo/AP
Second MAGA And Trump-Orchestrated
Coup Is Already Well Underway
BY John Bachtell
People's World
March 21, 2024- Once upon a time, if a presidential candidate predicted a “bloodbath” if they lost, called for terminating the Constitution, or was a serial rapist, insurrectionist, liar, and fraudster, they would have been termed a dangerous kook.
But when Trump says such things, the mainstream corporate media, more interested in profiting from the ads they take in as a result of the crisis, merely shrugs and turns to questions about President Biden’s age.
Meanwhile, the MAGA fascist threat to U.S. democracy grows, raising the stakes in the 2024 election outcome.
That threat grew when the MAGA-dominated U.S. Supreme Court continued its Constitutional Coup in real-time by negating Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The Court majority refused to bar Trump, the ringleader of the Jan. 6 insurrection, from the November ballot.
Days later, the Supreme Court’s “Federal Society Six” postponed Trump’s Jan. 6 insurrection trial date, ensuring he won’t face justice before Election Day. Other lower-court Federalist Society justices in Florida and Georgia are thwarting efforts to bring Trump to account and delay his trials until after the election.
The latest in a string of rulings penned by the “Federalist Society Six” blatantly undermines the rule of law and is a sign the plutocrats and Christian Nationalists behind the justices fully expect him to win.
It’s also a fresh reminder Americans can’t count on the corrupt and illegitimate GOP-dominated High Court to protect the “guardrails” of democracy but instead is actively dismantling it.
Trump, the MAGA fascists, and white supremacist Christian Nationalists have already organized one coup to reverse an election outcome, and they will stop at nothing to steal another, having learned from their failed coup. They are applying those lessons so that they don’t fail again in their already-underway second coup attempt.
Trump and MAGA have relentlessly battered the Constitution, breached every democratic norm, and undermined the rule of law. At a campaign rally in Ohio, people stood at attention while Jan. 6 insurrectionists sang the Star-Spangled Banner as they listened to a chorus of prisoners who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6 sing their rendition of it. Then Trump, who hailed the insurrectionists as patriots, declared the country would face a “bloodbath” if he weren’t elected.
Like the Nazis in Germany in the 1930’s who elevated a fascist thug, Horst Wessel, to the status of “hero”, Trump is describing the thugs who killed Capitol police as people to emulate, promising to let them out of jail if he is elected. Anyone old enough to have heard the Nazi anthem in memory of Horst Wessel sung by the fascists at that time would shudder at how similar Trump’s use of the national anthem was last week. He, after all, has said Hitler did many good things.
Given the corruption of the Supreme Court and the ambivalence of the corporate media, the anti-MAGA and pro-democracy majority is the only force capable of stopping this mass fascist movement from seizing power. Therefore, we must work tirelessly to mobilize, broaden, and unite it as never before.
Many Americans are not aware of Trump’s anti-democratic rants, including his vow to be “dictator for a day,” his terrifying 2025 project, and the 47 Agenda. Voters must be alert to the danger and turn out in massive numbers to deliver a crushing defeat to Trump and his MAGA minions.
MAGA knows most Americans hate Trump and so the fascists are already operating a scheme that will let them win the 2024 election even if they actually lose it. Even before we consider these special efforts already underway we must keep in mind that the popular vote winner can lose the presidency by losing the Electoral College, as occurred in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016.
Therefore, the victory must be overwhelming, especially in “battleground” states and Congressional Districts, to leave no doubt of the outcome and prevent MAGA from stealing the election.
Need to be informed
The American people need to be fully informed about the threat, including every new plot to steal the election, plots that go beyond reliance on the Electoral College. And as sure as the sun rises, that new fascist coup plot is already underway, one which would work even in a scenario in which Biden wins the popular vote, and the Electoral College and Democrats win majorities in the House and Senate.
Mark Medish and Joel McCleary detailed a terrifying scenario in the Washington Spectator. Under it, the MAGA GOP would brazenly ignore the majority will to install Trump as president and maintain their House majority. Once in power, Trump and the GOP would unleash the coercive power of the state to implement their terrifying Project 2025 agenda and impose an authoritarian fascist regime.
The scheme is perfectly legal under succession procedures outlined under the 20th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It takes advantage of other vulnerabilities and gaps in the U.S. electoral system, including the Electoral College, exposed during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
It brazenly dispenses with democratic norms and practices, which Trump and MAGA already do without hesitation, including side-stepping the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) passed in 2021. The plot blocks Congress from certifying the 270 plus electoral votes Biden will presumably win and throws the election into the House.
The scheme rests on the current paper-thin GOP House majority and the re-election by the GOP caucus of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who oversees the certification process. Johnson was the main organizer of 138 GOP House “election-denying” members who refused to certify the 2020 election.
“Next to the election of the president nothing is more important than the election of the new Speaker of the House,” write Medish and McCleary. “The party controlling the Speakership has the potential power to reverse the results of the Presidential election and deliver the White House to itself under the untested presidential succession mechanisms pursuant to the 20th Amendment and the Succession Act of 1947.”
Once thought to be a mere formality, certifying an election is now up in the air. Medish and McCleary write that those staging a coup with control of key levers of power can exploit vulnerabilities in the electoral system.
In January 2021, Democrats held the Congressional majority, and Nancy Pelosi was Speaker, ensuring certification and the will of the majority was followed. Critically, Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along with the Trump coup plans and recognize fake “alternative” electors from swing states.
Since then, GOP elected officials not sufficiently loyal to Trump have either quit Congress, been hounded out, or fallen in line. The GOP has purged all perceived as disloyal to Trump. The American people cannot count on the same level of internal opposition in the GOP to a coup in 2025 as in 2021.
The new House will be sworn in on Jan. 3, 2025. However, the plot would deny Democrats a majority were they to win, and thus, the GOP would control the election certification process. Under the plot, Republicans would legally contest close races won by Democrats. Republicans could bottle up disputed elections in the courts for months.
Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, is already a key part of a plan to declare Trump the winner of the 2024 election even if he loses the vote and Democrats win both the House and the Senate. Johnson and his cohorts could delay or refuse to seat Democrat victors in those “disputed” elections. The GOP would maintain its majority, thus carrying out a speak-led House coup and preserving a GOP Majority.
Could deny certification of Dems
“The current Republican majority in the 118th Congress, in preparation for the seating of the 119th Congress on Jan. 3, could deny certification of enough Democratic election winners to preserve the Republican majority in the new Congress. It is generally the old Congress certifies House member elections so that when the new congressional session begins, Congress can swiftly move to conduct business.”
The GOP majority could then ram through its rules for the new session, including those governing the presidential election certification procedure. The GOP majority could disregard the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA).
The scheme is perfectly legal and not reviewable by the Courts, but even if they were, the corrupt MAGA-dominated Supreme Court would approve it.
“Once the Republicans have effectively “stolen” the House majority and elected a speaker, the next step in an election denial process would be, with or without the assistance of a swing-state governors, to refuse to certify the Electoral College results of certain states on Jan. 6,” writes Tom Rogers.
“The recently enacted Electoral Count Reform Act (the ECRA) raised the number of objectors necessary not to certify any election, but there are enough election deniers in the House of Representatives to meet the new threshold,” notes Rogers. “Even if the Senate were not going to meet that objection threshold, the House refusal to certify would be enough to assure that no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College, thus throwing the presidential race into the House of Representatives.”
Under Federal Election Procedures, if it falls to the House to determine who is president, each state delegation is given one vote. That vote is determined by which party controls most congressional districts in the state. Currently, Republicans control 26 state delegations. The GOP coup is assured, legally.
There are backup schemes already underway too. The media has reported that Trump has put his daughter-in-law in charge of the Republican National Committee in order for him to be able to divert campaign funds for local Republicans into his pockets so he can pay his lawyers in all the court cases against him. While that is true there is another nefarious plan involved there to steal the 2024 election... ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Former Rudy Giuliani aide Lev Parnas, Image via screengrab/MSNBC.
Impeachment Hearing Backfires: Witness Accuses
Two Republicans Of 'Doing the Bidding' of Russia
By David Badash
Alternet
March 20, 2024 - The House Republicans’ impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden was dealt another significant blow when former Rudy Giuliani aide Lev Parnas, known as his Ukraine “fixer,” during a televised hearing declared two current Republican lawmakers were “doing the bidding” of Russia.
Parnas testified that U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), who was present at the hearing as his name was mentioned, and U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), “were doing the bidding for the Russians.”
Democratic Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee, Jamie Raskin, asked Parnas, “At what point did Mr. Giuliani begin working directly with Russian agents and Russian assets? Individuals who would later become sanctioned by Donald Trump’s own Treasury Department for spreading propaganda and disinformation against Joe Biden.”
Parnas said, “probably around May, June of 2019.”
Parnas also said “absolutely,” when asked if he and Giuliani were “aware that these people were basically just doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin?”
“So he had no hesitation about spreading lies that were concocted by Russian agents?” Raskin asked.
“As long as it fit the narrative. Absolutely not,” Parnas answered.
“How were you and Giuliani able to take these false allegations peddled by corrupt officials and Russian agents and promote and amplify them here in the United States in our political system? Weren’t media groups skeptical of your claims?” Raskin continued.
That’s when Parnas dropped the bombshell.
“Most media groups I’d probably say all, except for Fox and a few other right-wing media groups, didn’t want to take any of the information and that aggravated Rudy Giuliani and John Solomon, him and other players. And the main group that was being pushed through was Fox, Sean Hannity and some other media personalities over there.”
“But then there was also other people that were doing the bidding for the Russian people, in Congress,” Parnas continued, “like Senator Ron Johnson, like Congressman Pete Sessions, that sits here right now there, was with me from the very beginning of this journey into finding, digging dirt on Joe Biden.”
(In 2019 The New Yorkers award-winning investigative journalist Jane Mayer reported, “no journalist played a bigger part in fuelling the Biden corruption narrative than John Solomon, who until last week was an opinion columnist and executive vice-president of The Hill, in Washington.”)
During his opening statement, Parnas also indicted Republicans.
“Everything was for the ultimate benefit of Donald Trump and thereby Vladimir Putin. Because the team’s investigations were centered around Biden and Ukraine, I was designated the point person in every matter they pursued,” Parnas said. “That is how that is how I know with certainty that these Biden stories are untrue then and are untrue now. Congressman Pete Sessions, then Congressman Devin Nunes, Senator Ron Johnson, and many others understood they’re pushing a false narrative.”
“The same goes for John Solomon, Sean Hannity, and media personnel, particularly at Fox News, who used this narrative to manipulate the public ahead of the 2020 elections. Sadly, they’re still doing this today as we approach the 2024 elections. We cannot separate this conspiracy from the Russian-Ukraine war because Trump has no intention to keep aiding Ukraine.”
“Without the support of the United States and NATO, millions in Ukraine will suffer and die. If we allow Russia to defeat Ukraine eventually that suffering will reach American shores. Today, I admit my own wrongdoings. I have been a convicted federal election campaign and fraud crimes and served my sentence. I do not hide that from reality. It is part of my truth. Despite rigorous attempts by those in power to silence me. I will be silenced no longer.”
The Lincoln Project’s co-founder, Mike Madrid, responded to Parnas’ opening statement: “Pete Sessions. Devin Nunes. Ron Johnson. Sean Hannity. Traitors.”
Calling Republicans “a national security risk,” political strategist Rachel Bitecofer wrote: “House Republicans knew their source was a Russian asset, the same House Republicans did the same thing during the Ukraine blackmail impeachment where intel told them their info was Russian disinformation but they used it anyway.” ...Read More
|
|
Photo: An illustration of a man on a swing set while voting in a voting booth. Mother Jones illustration; Getty
Here Are the Only Swing Voters
You Need to Care About in 2024
One percent of the US population spread across seven states could decide this election.
By David Corn
Mother Jones
Donald Trump’s criminal cases. Joe Biden’s age. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Migrants at the border. Food prices. There are many factors that can decide the 2024 presidential election and set the future course of the United States.
But this titanic contest is likely to be determined by a tiny slice of the nation’s citizens—3 million or so voters. That’s less than 1 percent of the population. A repeat face-off between presumed nominees Biden and Trump holds potentially huge consequences for the nation. Will the executive branch be controlled by a deceptive demagogue with autocratic impulses who tried to overturn the last election? Will the US take the necessary steps to address the climate crisis? Will America continues to support Ukraine in its battle against Russia? Yet the mathematics of this election are rather simple and small.
Let’s run through the numbers. Since the best predictor of the future is the past, start with the 2020 race.
There were seven states that year where the margin of victory was under 3 percent: Georgia (.3 percent), Pennsylvania (1.2 percent), Michigan (2.8 percent), Wisconsin (.6 percent), Arizona (.4 percent), Nevada (2.4 percent), and North Carolina (1.3) percent. Biden won six, losing only North Carolina. In 2016, Trump triumphed in six of these seven, with Hillary Clinton collecting the Electoral College votes of Nevada. These clearly are the key states for 2024. (Florida and New Hampshire were tight in 2016, but not in 2020.) Call this collection of states Swinglandia.
All told, there were 30.6 million votes in Swinglandia in the previous presidential election. Add them up and here’s the split: 15.4 million for Biden, 15.2 million for Trump. Tight as a tick. Biden collectively won this bloc 50.4 percent to 49.6 percent. That was much closer than the national tally: 51.3 percent to 46.9 percent for Biden.
These states will probably be where the election, once again, is decided. If Biden is victorious in any four of them, he will win (absent any major surprise elsewhere). If he places first in three, he will have to do so in a combination that yields him at least 41 electoral votes. (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin would do the trick for him, with three votes to spare.) If he only bags two of these seven states, he will be out of a job.
Trump needs to win an assortment of four of these states that provide 54 electoral votes (not all combos of four will do that). (You can do the math at home. Here are the states’ electoral votes: Arizona, 11; Georgia, 16; Michigan, 15; Nevada, 6; North Carolina, 16, Pennsylvania, 19; and Wisconsin, 10.)
In one way or another, these 30.6 million Americans hold the key to victory. But most of them are already spoken for—that is, they have made up their minds. This is hardly surprising, given Biden and Trump are known quantities. They’ve both inhabited the White House. They each have offered voters plenty of information and impressions on which to base a vote. Yet polls overall show that about 10 percent of voters are undecided at this point. That would indicate that about 3 million voters in Swinglandia are up for grabs. A slight tipping within this group of voters could determine who lands in the White House.
This is, of course, nuts.
Billions of dollars are being spent to influence the 2024 election. (Fourteen billion dollars were funneled into the 2020 election.) Yet 3 million folks across seven states will be the main deciders. And we can presume that many of them are on the fence because they are not deeply engaged with the nation’s political debate. Those Americans who intensely or moderately follow politics will likely have a preference in this race between familiar candidates who offer stark differences regarding policy and temperament (though not age). Voters who haven’t yet made up their minds are probably people who don’t interact much with the political realm.
This poses a challenge for the political pros: How do you reach these voters? They are probably not paying close attention to politics via the news media or social media. How do you make contact if you cannot hit them with ads or posts? How do you find the right doors to knock on, the right phone numbers to text or call? Moreover, if they are undecided at this point, after Trump’s four years in office (and his conduct afterward) and Biden’s three years (and his long stints as vice president and senator), it’s a good bet they won’t make up their minds until they must. That means weeks—or days—before the November election. Ads at this point—if they even are seen—might not be effective... ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) is welcomed to the stage by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) President Michael Tuchin during the committee’s annual policy summit Grand Hyatt on June 05, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
A Statement From Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC
'We will support candidates who are opposed by AIPAC, and who are advocates for peace and a new, just US policy toward Israel/Palestine.'
By Jewish Americans Opossing AIPAC
For decades, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (or AIPAC) has been the most powerful wing of the Israel lobby in the United States. Until recently, it enjoyed almost total support from politicians in both major political parties.
In the past few years, though, attitudes within the Democratic Party towards Israel, Palestine, and AIPAC itself have begun to shift dramatically, threatening AIPAC’s lobbying power. In response, AIPAC has begun aggressively intervening in Democratic primary elections, spending vast sums of money to defeat political candidates who might oppose the policies of the Israeli government. AIPAC recently boasted that it was “dollar for dollar, the largest contributor to candidates in the 2022 midterm elections,” and it has plans to spend even more money in 2024.
Much of AIPAC’s power and legitimacy derives from the idea that it broadly represents the views of American Jews. But Jews have never been a monolith, and, in the wake of Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza, more and more Jewish Americans are speaking up in favor of a different kind of politics.
The following open letter is a clear example of this. It has been signed by prominent Jewish Americans from every walk of life, all of whom have decided to publicly repudiate both AIPAC’s unconditional embrace of the Israeli government and its attempts to crush the nascent movement within the Democratic Party for a new approach to Israel and Palestine.
The text of the letter follows.
We are Jewish Americans who have varying perspectives. We’ve come together to highlight and oppose the unprecedented and damaging role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allied groups in US elections, especially within Democratic Party primaries. We recognize that the purpose of AIPAC’s interventions in electoral politics is to defeat any critics of Israeli government policy and to support candidates who vow unwavering loyalty to Israel, thereby ensuring the United States’ continuing support for all that Israel does, regardless of its violence and illegality.
Given that Israel is so isolated internationally that it could not continue its inhumane treatment of the Palestinians without US political and military support, AIPAC is an essential link in the chain that holds in place the unbearable tragedy of Israel/Palestine. In the coming US elections, we need to break that chain in order to help free the people of Israel/Palestine to pursue peaceful coexistence.
In the same 2021-22 election cycle in which AIPAC endorsed Republican extremists and dozens of Congress members who’d voted against certifying Biden’s victory over Trump, AIPAC’s network raised millions from Trump donors and spent the money inside Democratic primaries against progressives, mostly candidates of color. AIPAC is now vowing to spend even more millions in the 2024 Democratic primaries, targeting specific Democrats in Congress—initially all legislators of color—who’ve advocated for a Gaza cease-fire, a position supported by the vast majority of Democratic voters. AIPAC’s election spending increasingly works to defeat candidates who criticize Israel’s racist policies.
In contrast to AIPAC, we are American Jews who believe that US support for foreign governments should only be extended to those that respect the full human and civil rights, and right to self-determination, of all people. We oppose all forms of racism and bigotry, including antisemitism—and we support the historic alliance in our country of Jewish Americans with African Americans and other people of color in the cause of civil rights and equal justice.
Therefore, we strongly oppose AIPAC’s attempts to dominate Democratic primary elections. We call on Democratic candidates to not accept AIPAC network funding, and demand that the Democratic leadership not allow Republican funders to use that network to deform Democratic primary elections. We will support candidates who are opposed by AIPAC, and who are advocates for peace and a new, just US policy toward Israel/Palestine.
Signed by:
(Organizational Affiliations For Identification Purposes Only)
Adam Gold, Senior Strategist, Working Families Party
Adam Shatz, London Review of Books
Alan Levine, Civil rights lawyer
Alan Minsky, Executive Director, Progressive Democrats of America
Alicia T. Singham Goodwin, Political Director at Jews For Racial & Economic Justice
Rabbi Alissa Wise, Lead Organizer, Rabbis for Ceasefire
Alisse Waterson, Presidential Scholar and Professor, John Jay College, CUNY
Anna Baltzer, Author, Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, M4BL Black Hive/Black Alliance for Peace ...and many more ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador speaks during his regular press conference at the National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico, March 20, 2024. Mexico Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
Mexico Won't Accept Deportations
from Texas, Calls Law 'Dehumanizing'
From Reuters
MEXICO CITY, March 20 (Reuters) - Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador sharply criticized a Texas law that would empower state law enforcement authorities to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, saying Mexico will not accept anyone repatriated by Texas.
"Let me say this once and for all, we will not accept deportations from the Texan government," Lopez Obrador said on Wednesday at his daily news conference.
The law, which was blocked again late on Tuesday by a federal appeals court, just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for it to go into effect, is draconian, dehumanizing and unfair, Lopez Obrador said, underscoring it would prompt a diplomatic response from Mexico.
"We oppose this draconian law, it is completely contrary to human rights, completely dehumanizing, anti-Christian, unjust, it violates the norms of human coexistence (and) not only international law, but even violates the Bible," he said.
Reporting by Raul Cortes Fernandez and Valentine Hilaire; Writing by Anthony Esposito; editing by Stephen Eisenhammer ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and UAW president Shawn Fain speak at a rally in support of United Auto Workers
The Case For A 32-hour Workweek With No Loss in Pay
Bernie Sanders, an independent, represents Vermont in the U.S. Senate. Shawn Fain is president of the United Auto Workers.
By Bernie Sanders and Shawn Fain
Washington Post Op-Ed
March 19, 2024 - Although it is rarely discussed in the media, the Senate overwhelmingly passed legislation to establish a 30-hour workweek in 1933. While that legislation ultimately failed because of intense opposition from corporate America, a few years later President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law and a 40-hour workweek was established in 1940.
Unbelievably, 84 years later, despite massive growth in technology and worker productivity, nothing has changed.
Today, American workers are more than 400 percent more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet, despite this fact, millions of our people are working longer hours for lower wages. In fact, 28.5 million Americans now work over 60 hours a week, and more than half of full-time employees work more than 40 hours a week.
The sad reality is, Americans work more hours than the people of most other wealthy nations. In 2022, U.S. workers logged 204 more hours a year than employees in Japan, 279 more hours than those in the United Kingdom and 470 more hours than those in Germany.
Despite these long hours, the average worker in America makes almost $50 a week less than he or she did 50 years ago, after adjusting for inflation.
Let that sink in for a moment. In a 1974 office, there were no computers, email, cellphones, conference calling or Zoom. In factories and warehouses, there were no robots or sophisticated machinery, no cloud computing. In grocery stores and shops of all kinds, there were no checkout counters using bar codes.
Think about all the incredible advancements in technology — computers, robotics, artificial intelligence — and the huge increase in worker productivity that has been achieved. What have been the results of these changes for working people? Almost all the economic gains have gone straight to the top, while wages for workers are stagnant or worse.
While CEOs are making nearly 400 times as much as their average employees, many workers are seeing their family lives fall apart, missing their children’s birthday parties and Little League Baseball games, as they are forced to spend more time at work. What stresses them out even further is that many still do not have enough money to pay rent, put food on the table and send their kids to college without going deeply into debt.
This should not be happening in the United States of America in 2024. It’s time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.
Let’s be clear. This is not a radical idea: Belgium has already adopted a four-day workweek. Other developed countries are moving toward this model, such as France (35-hour workweek and considering reducing to 32) and Norway and Denmark (roughly 37-hour workweeks). In 2019, Microsoft tested a four-day workweek in Japan and reported a 40 percent increase in productivity.
Last year, the United Kingdom conducted a four-day workweek pilot program of 3,000 workers at more than 60 companies, and it was a huge success for both workers and employers. Over 73 percent of workers who participated in this program reported greater satisfaction with their work. Businesses that participated in this program saw a 35 percent average increase in revenue, and 91 percent of businesses opted to continue a four-day workweek after the study concluded.
Studies have shown that workers are either equally or more productive during a four-day workweek — one study found that worker productivity rose, with 55 percent saying their ability at work increased after companies adopted this new schedule. In addition, 57 percent of workers in companies that have moved to a four-day workweek have indicated that they are less likely to quit their jobs.
Moreover, at a time when so many of our people are struggling with their mental health, 71 percent of workers in companies that have moved to a four-day workweek report feeling less burnout, 39 percent reported feeling less stress and 46 percent reported feeling less fatigued.
Even Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, predicted last year that advancements in technology could lead to a three- or 3½-day workweek.
Who Benefits?
The question is: Who will benefit from this transformation? Will it be the billionaire class or workers? In our view, the choice is obvious. At a time of massive income and wealth inequality and huge increases in productivity, the financial gains from new technology must go to workers, not just to the people on top.
As part of their historic contract negotiations with the Big Three automakers — General Motors, Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) — the United Auto Workers called for the introduction of a four-day, 32-hour workweek at the same rate of pay and overtime pay for anything beyond that.
Despite significant gains for workers in their new contract, they were not successful in winning that demand. The struggle continues. ...Read More
|
|
Photo: Migrants reach through a border wall for clothing handed out by volunteers, as they wait between two border walls to apply for asylum, Friday, May 12, 2023, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
We Need Practical — And Humane — Migration Solutions
By Bridget Moix
Religion News Service
March 19, 2024 (RNS) — Our broken immigration system is certainly a high priority for my family and me — just as it has become a pressing public issue in an election year when legislators seem determined to further politicize the conversation.
The current debate? Inserting permanent policy changes into the Department of Homeland Security’s annual spending legislation, one of a handful of bills that need to pass to avoid a government shutdown.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 130 million people will be forcibly displaced or stateless in 2024, an increase only expected to grow with renewed conflict across the globe. We will never modernize and meet the country’s migration management needs if policy solutions are couched in provisions like the failed bipartisan Senate Emergency National Security Supplemental Act of 2024. The bill would have, based on arbitrary benchmarks, closed the door on individuals and families seeking refuge.
Migration is a necessity, and deterrence laws will never dissuade the movement of people as they seek peace, prosperity and security. I believe that our system, if properly funded and supported by smart, humane policies, could help solve those challenges migrants face today.
But even as calls for border wall funding continue in Congress’ current spending debates, I know we have had it easy.
Unlike millions of asylum-seekers, my family never had to flee for safety, risk our lives crossing deserts, suffer abuse at the hands of traffickers and authorities or be separated from each other. Neither have we tried to start a new life without the right to work or a place to live.
I am cognizant that my family did not have to endure the hardships that millions of people, including peacebuilders, experienced when they were forced to flee their homes as violence overran their communities and they, themselves, became targets. My family has hosted several such migrants, and their gut-wrenching stories gave me a deeper insight into forced migration.
Even so, as the mother of two Mexican American teenagers, migration policy matters personally. Unfortunately, it has become a highly divisive issue — and a leading election topic — where the people most affected are the least consulted by those in power in Washington.
For me and my fellow Quaker leaders, migration is, at its core, an issue of justice that is grounded in our faith. Members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) came to the U.S. from England in the 17th century to escape religious persecution. In 2020, heads of Quaker organizations wrote in a joint statement: “All those fleeing conflict and persecution, including human trafficking survivors and other vulnerable populations, deserve the opportunity to pursue safe, productive, and fruitful lives. Strengthening our legal asylum processes and refugee resettlement program is essential to ensure proper protection.” Our policymakers fall short on this issue.
During the 2016 presidential elections, I tried to shield my two young boys from the anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican rhetoric that swirled all around us. I cried when my 4-year-old asked if we would not be able to visit “los abuelos” because of “the big wall” they were building.
Sadly, current immigration debates focus more on whether one party or another should be credited for solving the problem this election year. They are not centered on the experience of migrants — like my children and my fellow seekers of peace — who need to be assured of their basic human rights and dignity.
Sincere bipartisan negotiations and solutions on immigration law are overdue. Congress should strip immigration of the politics that has entangled it and focus on the lives of the people at risk.
Several common-sense reforms are possible. Train and hire more asylum officers to reduce screening delays. Allow asylum-seekers to work for themselves and their families by providing work permits within one month after their cases are filed. Fully fund humane migration management policies like the Shelter and Services Program. Who could take issue with that?
Finally, the government must strategically address the root causes of migration, including rising authoritarianism and violence, climate change and massive economic inequality.
As Quakers, we have a responsibility to advocate for the rights of other migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. It is part of our own history and an expression of our belief in the divine dignity — or that of God — in every person. ...Read More
|
|
Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture: |
|
|
The Health Benefits Of The New EPA Auto Emissions Rule
Fewer deaths, lung illnesses and asthma-related school absences will boost the economy, lower health care costs and reduce disparities.
By Merrill Goozner
GoozNews
MAR 22, 2024 - Most of the news coverage of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule ordering auto emissions be cut in half by 2032 focused on its impact on jobs, on the economy and on the nation’s transition away from fossil fuels.
Reporters covering the announcement highlighted the opposition from the oil and gas industry; the likely lawsuits; and the political ramifications in an election year. Former president Donald Trump has made opposition to the Biden administration’s support for electric vehicles (EVs) a major part of his campaign.
Yet the rule released Wednesday contained a wealth of information (with references to studies) documenting the major health benefits that will accrue from the nation’s gradual shift to EVs and plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) over the next few decades. Those benefits deserve to be better known.
The New York Times story used just one set of health-related numbers in the 1,181-page rule: “The regulation would provide nearly $100 billion in annual net benefits to society, according to the agency, including $13 billion of annual public health benefits thanks to improved air quality.” (Actually, the EPA estimated the annual public health benefits to reach $16 billion to $36 billion by 2055. See Page 61 of the rule.)
The Associated Press account did manage to quote EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who told reporters at a briefing the final standards will reduce air pollution-caused heart attacks, respiratory illnesses and asthma. “Folks, these new standards are so important for public health, for American jobs, for our economy and for our planet,’' he said.
The health effects of cleaner air
Let’s unpack the public health part of that statement, starting with the number of saved lives. The rule estimated that cutting air pollution nearly in half by 2032 will save about 2,500 lives per year by 2055 (the Washington Post did report this aspect). That is probably a conservative estimate.
Since 1990, the gradually improving fuel efficiency of internal combustion engine-powered vehicles — driven by previously-enacted EPA standards — resulted in a more than 40% reduction in air pollution-related deaths. Yet there are still anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 deaths annually from air pollution, according to a 2019 study. That’s twice the number that die from gun violence, including suicides.
Given that cars and light trucks account for just under 30% of air emissions, it seems logical to say that light vehicle tailpipe emissions account for at least 25,000-30,000 excess deaths per year from heart attacks, cancers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Cutting emissions in half should save 15,000 lives per year by 2055, or nearly six times the EPA’s estimated number.
Not everyone who suffers from pollution-related diseases dies, of course. But those affected incur far higher health care costs than people who do not live near major highways, in car-crowded cities, or in communities that host major transportation hubs.
Those would include children and adults who suffer from asthma, which is caused in part by the small particulate matter associated with light automobiles and trucks, according to recent research. The number of individuals with asthma doubled between 1980 and 2000 to about 15 million Americans. Its growth has leveled off in recent years, due, in part, to better auto and other industry emission controls.
However, an estimated 5-6 million children still suffer from asthma, which during severe episodes can result in lost school days, hospitalizations and even death. “While researchers do not fully understand how air pollution exposure increases asthma prevalence, evidence suggests air pollutants suppress genes that regulate the immune system’s ability to differentiate an allergen from a dangerous foreign substance, such as a virus or bacteria,” the EPA reported. “The immune system then goes into action, setting up an inflammatory response whether the substance is harmful or not, which leads to asthma.”
Childhood asthma is worse in minority neighborhoods, which are disproportionately adjacent to high-trafficked corridors. In 2018-2020, about 12 percent of non-Hispanic Black; 9 percent of non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native; and 7 percent of Hispanic children were estimated to have asthma, according to the EPA. That compares to just 6 percent of non-Hispanic white children.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent survey showed that close to half of all school-age children have missed at least one day a year due to asthma. This was down somewhat from previous surveys, probably because of more widespread use of inhalers. Still, children with asthma miss 2 1/2 times more school days per year compared to children without asthma.
EV adoption pace slowing?
Rather than educating the public about the positive health effects of reducing air pollution, most media accounts focused on the slowing pace of EV adoption. The year over-year-increase in EV sales fell to “only” 40% in the fourth quarter of 2023, which was below the 49% increase in Q3 and the 52% jump in Q2.
But let’s put that “slowdown” in perspective: EV’s total market share leaped to 7.9% in 2023 from 5.9% the previous year. If one includes sales of PHEVs, which can go up to 40-60 miles without using their gas-power engines, total sales for battery-powered vehicles rose 51% last year to a record 1.4 million vehicles, which was 9% of all light vehicles sold in a year where 15.6 million vehicles were sold, just a shade under the record year of 2013.EVs). ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Photo: The United Farm Worker’s 1,000 Mile March, 1975. (Photo by Cathy Murphy / Getty Images)
How Unions Are Made
A new history of labor organizing in Coachella tells not only the story of the United Farm Workers but also how its rank-and-file members drove the union to success.
By Juan Ignacio Mora
The Nation
Today, Coachella is probably best known for the six-day, two-weekend music festival in which 125,000 concertgoers descend on the valley and listen to the likes of Bad Bunny, Rosalía, and Blink-182.
But there has always been another Coachella. In this one, farmworkers grow and harvest citrus, dates, and table grapes, providing the labor that has driven the area’s agricultural industry to a $700 million valuation.
Coachella, in fact, was where Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and a cadre of organizers founded the United Farm Workers, and it was central to the UFW’s prolonged struggle for collective-bargaining rights and farmworker justice that eventually succeeded in compelling most California table-grape growers to sign contracts with the union in 1970.
In an effort to highlight this history, a grassroots community organization, the TODEC (Training Occupational Development Educating Communities) Legal Center, has now arranged for 10 billboards to be placed along the major highways leading to the concert site at Indio’s Empire Polo Club. Featuring the image of a group of farmworkers with “The Real Coachella” emblazoned at the top, the billboards remind concertgoers of the farmworkers who live and labor in the area year-round but go largely unnoticed by the festival’s attendees, who are there for Coachella or the Stagecoach Country Music Festival that immediately follows it.
The billboards also hark back to a more rebellious history of labor organizing and social justice movements in the region, when Chavez, Huerta, Philip Vera Cruz, and countless other members of the UFW brought visibility to the plight of farmworkers.
Labor historian Christian Paiz counts at least 10 books, a major motion picture, and two documentary films produced by others on the history of the United Farm Workers. Despite the copious amounts of work on the UFW, Paiz continues to unearth powerful stories to tell about the organization and the history of labor in the region.
His new book, Strikers of Coachella, goes beyond the familiar names of Chavez and Huerta to challenge how scholars and the general public approach the United Farm Workers as a historical subject. Who were the Coachella workers who decided to join the UFW movement or who abstained from it? What were these farmworkers’ aspirations, and how much were they willing to risk? And what were their everyday lives like?
Strikers of Coachella is a book, Paiz explains, that “aims to move in rhythm with farmworkers’ steps and gazes—to consider the weight of life lived in shaping choices, or the felt precariousness in the gamble that is to strike while poor and non-white, or the palpable quality of holding aspirations for changes that feel always impossible and yet, occasionally, possibly real.”
The United Farm Workers has been one of the most recognizable Mexican American–led labor organizations in the United States, and yet it was always more than just that: It represented a variety of different visions of self-determination and liberation. Throughout Strikers of Coachella, Paiz seeks to explain the social and political roots of these visions, reflecting on the movement’s members and their differences in ethnicity, gender, age, ideology, and activist experience. Emblematic of the union’s diversity were members like Peter Velasco and Amalia Uribe Deaztlan. Velasco migrated from the Philippines to the United States in 1930 and served in World War II before he settled in the San Joaquin Valley. After suffering years of marginalization and arduous working conditions alongside other Filipinos in the grape and vegetable fields of white ranchers, Velasco helped lead the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee’s 1965 Delano Grape Strike.
By that time, he was in his mid-50s, an adept organizer with decades of farm labor experience, but he was only, it seems, getting started. Following the merger of AWOC and the National Farm Workers Association, Velasco embraced an even larger role organizing the UFW’s Coachella Grape Strike in 1969.
Deatzlan also demonstrated the heterogeneity of the UFW. Her mother, Amalia Becerra, was an indigenous Purépecha ejidataria who gained land through Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas’s agrarian reform program. After migrating from Michoacán to Mexicali, Baja California, in the 1950s, Deatzlan’s family eventually settled in the Coachella Valley in 1960, where her parents worked on local farms. Following years of racially segregated education, Deatzlan left school at the age of 14 and joined her parents in the fields.
For the next five years, she worked with other Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers and drew inspiration from the blossoming Chicano Movement. Soon, Deatzlan became politically active herself and joined the 1969 Coachella Grape Strike that Velasco had helped organize. As the UFW movement spread throughout California in the 1960s and ’70s, it brought in a variety of members: Filipino and Mexican, old and young, men and women, residents and migrants, committed and hesitant, seasoned and newer farmworkers. The union, like many others forming at the time, could not represent just one issue or group; it had to draw new lines of solidarity that reflected the diverse backgrounds of the marginalized workers found in the Coachella Valley’s fields.
To fully understand the efforts by people like Velasco and Deatzlan to expand the lines of solidarity, Paiz explores not only the diversity of the UFW’s members but also its institutional origins. ...Read More
|
|
|
|
Trump's Lawyer Won't Deny If He's Asked Russia, Saudi Arabia For Bond Money
Asked bluntly about it on Fox News, Alina Habba quickly changed the subject.
By Ryan Grenoble
Huffington Post
Mar 21, 2024 - Has Donald Trump asked Russia, Saudi Arabia or any other country for help paying his upcoming $464 million bond?
Judging by Alina Habba’s response to exactly that question, he hasn’t not asked for it.
Instead of offering an emphatic “no” during an appearance on Fox News Wednesday - the obvious and only correct answer - the Trump attorney said she couldn’t “speak about strategy” and vaguely referred to “rules and regulations.”
“Is there any effort on the part of your team to secure this money through another country, Saudi Arabia or Russia, as Joy Behar seems to think?” host Martha MacCallum asked, referring to speculation that Trump might be susceptible to foreign influence.
“Well, there’s rules and regulations that are public,” Habba said. “I can’t speak about strategy, that requires certain things, and we have to follow those rules.”
Habba then called Trump’s multimillion-dollar fraud settlement “manifest injustice.”
Hours after Habba’s unsettling non-answer, former U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice sounded the alarm about Trump being under the influence of foreign adversaries.
“In the event that [Trump] has to take that money from an individual or an entity, whether domestic or international, that individual or entity will potentially have real influence over him, and so that is of concern,” Rice told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.
“There’s just so many ways the stench of money from dubious places infuses his business enterprise, and so this would add more questions should that be the case going forward.”
A New York state judge convicted Trump of civil fraud last month and ordered him to pay more than $350 million in damages for decades of fraudulent business practices.
The number has swelled by roughly $112,000 a day as the debt accrues interest, pending Trump’s attempts to appeal the judgment.
Trump’s lawyers acknowledged this week that the twice-impeached former president, who’s claimed to be worth more than $10 billion, doesn’t have sufficient cash to pay the bond.
New York Attorney General Letitia James provided a 30-day grace period after Trump filed an appeal. That expires on March 25, at which point the state could begin seizing Trump’s assets. ...Read More
|
|
Header image: A psychiatric ward in Heihe, Heilongjiang province, 2021. Qiu Qilong/VCG)
The Nurse ‘Nurturing Mushrooms’ on a Psych Ward in China
Yu Lei, a nurse at a psychiatric hospital from eastern China, aims to break the stigma associated with mental illness by posting about her experiences on social media.
Editor’s note: Yu Lei is a nurse at a tertiary psychiatric hospital in China’s eastern Jiangsu province with more than 10 years of experience. Her hospital receives patients with various mental health conditions, referred through government and nonprofit relief programs. Between shifts, she shares her “psych ward stories” on social media.
By Oh! Youth
Sixth Tone
March 20, 2024 - Yu Lei had only been working at the psychiatric hospital a few days when she first heard the “mushroom story.” It tells the tale of a patient who would squat in a corner holding an umbrella and remain completely motionless, refusing to eat or drink, because he believed he was a mushroom. One day, a doctor took an umbrella and joined him. After some time, he convinced the patient that mushrooms can also walk and eat, and gradually the patient began to recover.
Yu found the story touching. She wanted to be like that doctor and “become a mushroom” with her patients, to step into their inner worlds.
Recently, the tertiary psychiatric hospital where Yu works has seen an increase in the number of new patients. She works mainly in the men’s ward and often is so busy she feels her feet barely touch the ground.
Reflecting on her work in recent months, she finds that she spends most of her time either dealing with patients’ various bodily secretions or answering endless questions. She also spends a lot of time washing feet — smelly feet, muddy feet, blistered feet, calloused feet, bleeding feet, all kinds of feet. She says she can probably guess a person’s age and occupation just by looking at their feet.
Newly admitted patients are usually in the acute phase of their illness and experiencing extreme stress. For example, one patient recently greeted Yu by declaring that he wanted to “slaughter her.” Yu inwardly laughs off such remarks, but the hospital’s strict safety protocols required her to restrain him. “Every year, there’s some patient who wants to kill me. I’ve become numb to it,” Yu says with a resigned sigh.
When she was new to the profession, Yu struggled to deal with the negative emotions triggered by threats from patients. A large, heavily tattooed man she was assigned to would attempt to intimidate her every day. “If you don’t XYZ, I’ll XYZ,” was how he would usually phrase his threats. Enduring this day after day took its toll on Yu. One day, in a fit of pique, she screamed back at him: “Just go ahead and kill me!” Around this time, she thought about resigning almost every day, she recalls.
Yu graduated from nursing school in 2010 and took up her position at the psychiatric hospital. Since then, she has dealt with all manner of patients, including a middle-aged schizophrenic who had stabbed a passerby for coughing near him, and a man claiming to be the King of Wuji Kingdom, a character in the Chinese classic “Journey to the West,” who had traveled through time to the present day.
Yu says she will never forget her first day on the job. On the way from the nurses’ office to the ward, the head nurse had comforted her by saying: “The ward may look chaotic, but there’s no need to be afraid.” However, as soon as they reached the doors, Yu was welcomed by the sight of a nurse covered in blood being carried out after an incident with a patient.
From that moment, Yu says she felt a deep sense of reverence for the job. “We must respect psychiatric patients. They are all human; they’re just sick.”
Preventative measures
When gathering information about newly admitted patients, Yu pays special attention to those experiencing auditory hallucinations, as it’s essential to ascertain whether their hallucinations are commanding in nature. For these patients, the voice in their head can act like a radar, constantly scanning the environment for signals it can respond to, which sometimes can lead to anti-social and even criminal behavior.
Yu believes that psychiatric patients have their own closed-loop logic that people who haven’t experienced mental illness cannot comprehend or relate to. All she can do is try her hardest to understand her patients and make the best use of the available medical resources to treat them.
Psychiatric care nurses are required to prevent patients from behaving impulsively, running away, self-harming, and hiding medications. To make sure patients take their medication, the hospital provides only transparent, wide-mouthed drinking cups. Yu personally watches every patient as they take their medication, then meticulously inspects their mouth, cup, hands, and pockets for unswallowed pills.
For Yu, the most challenging patients to care for are those with depression. Although the ward undergoes safety checks every day, some patients still seek any means to harm themselves. Yu recalls a young man diagnosed with bipolar disorder who, in the middle of the night, took advantage of a blind spot in the surveillance system to swallow a whole toothbrush.
Violent outbursts are unfortunately inevitable in a psychiatric hospital. Almost every nurse has had their hair pulled by a patient, sometimes so badly it left a bald patch. Scratches are also common.
Once, Yu was working with a tall, transgendered woman when she was kicked in the chest, knocking her back against the wall. Other patients can be verbally abusive. A few years ago, Yu’s ward admitted a man who often exposed himself and made obscene remarks to female nurses. On one occasion, his behavior was so upsetting that Yu locked herself in a bathroom to cry.
Working in the psychiatric ward means guarding not only against physical and verbal assaults, but also against patients’ romantic and sexual advances.
Yu’s supervisor was onRce pursued by a patient to the point where she had to leave work secretly through the fire escape, and several female doctors have been pinned down by patients during night shifts. Male doctors have also been pursued by female patients. One woman was so infatuated with a male doctor on the ward that she voluntarily readmitted herself after being discharged.
Yu jokes with her colleagues that psychiatric nurses can’t afford to look too attractive. Senior nurses will also teach younger carers strategies to fend off advances, such as telling every patient that you’re 40 years old and have two children, regardless of your true age.
For this reason, throughout her decade-long career in the psychiatric hospital, Yu’s persona has always been that of a middle-aged woman with children. At the same time, her real-life identity has gradually caught up — she is now a 30-something mother with a child in primary school.
Whenever Yu is asked to reflect on her career, one word comes to mind: “Exhausted.” During her breaks, she goes to a coffee shop and makes a special order: “Give me an espresso that’s even more bitter than my life.”
To let off steam, Yu jumps rope on her balcony every night, usually 3,000 to 5,000 reps. When the weather is warm, she also goes jogging.
Highs and lows
Yu says she often looks to the “mushroom story” to seek inspiration. For a start, she believes what her patients tell her. Many people are initially unwilling to talk about their experiences with mental illness; they may have opened up to others in the past, but had their feelings dismissed or ignored. It is important they feel heard, Yu says.
She is also as straight with them as possible. For instance, when a patient refuses to take their medication, she will tell them: “If the psychiatric hospital was utopia and you wanted to live here forever, you could get away with not taking your meds. But society is different. Society has rules.”
Yu’s time in the ward has also brought some heartwarming moments. One day, a young man who graduated from a Shanghai university wrote the word “banknote” on the edge of a piece of paper, tore it off, and handed it to her, explaining that holding the piece of paper would bring her wealth — he was sure because “the heavens had told him so.”
Two years ago, Yu began sharing her experiences from the ward and personal reflections on social media, attracting many curious readers. She hopes that her blog can not only stimulate fans’ curiosity, but also help remove the stigma associated with mental illness. After all, everyone has their problems.
Yu’s patients are referred to her hospital through various mental health relief initiatives. Many are homeless, and self-harm is common. Yu often uses mindfulness techniques to help people in crisis. “I always tell them: ‘You must learn to control yourself. The medical staff in the psychiatric hospital will give you a hand when you’re on the cliff’s edge, but you have to climb up with your own willpower. Please, don’t let yourself fall into the abyss.’”
During the treatment of one patient, a Ph.D. scholar from a prestigious university who experienced severe depression after graduation and attempted suicide several times, Yu noticed that he liked to draw. When he was eventually deemed healthy enough to be discharged, Yu asked him to send her one of his artworks. Since then, she’s received a sketch from him once a week.
When Yu encounters patients who are contemplating suicide, she tells them: “When you lose your reason for living, you can find a new one. When you can’t find the meaning of life, just focus on surviving and leave the rest to time.”
Not long ago, one of Yu’s patients committed suicide just a month after being discharged from hospital, causing her to question the value of her profession. Later, the head nurse comforted her by saying that not all sickness can be cured, and not everyone can be saved.
Over her years in the psychiatric ward, Yu has cared for many people who have survived catastrophes. Some have made a full recovery, while others continue with their struggle to survive. “All we can do is respond to their suffering,” she says.
Recently, a publishing house contacted Yu to discuss compiling her experiences into a book. When the editor asked her to suggest a title for the book, she gave it much consideration before she finally answered: “I Nurture Mushrooms in a Psychiatric Hospital.”
Reported by Zhang Jing.
(Due to privacy concerns, Yu Lei is a pseudonym.)
Translator: Carrie Davies; contributions: Strapko Nastassia; editors: Xue Ni and Hao Qibao. ...Read More
|
|
New Journals and Books for Radical Education...
Use Changemaker for Your Holiday Gifts,
Thus Lending Us a Hand, Too!
|
|
From Upton
Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University
Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education
Paperback USD 17.00
This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.
|
|
The Man Who Changed Colors
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
When a dockworker falls to his death under strange circumstances, investigative journalist David Gomes is on the case. His dogged pursuit of the truth puts his life in danger and upends the scrappy Cape Cod newspaper he works for.
Spend a season on the Cape with this gripping, provocative tale that delves into the
complicated relationships between Cape Verdean Americans and African Americans, Portuguese fascist gangs, and abusive shipyard working conditions. From the author of The Man Who Fell From The Sky.
“Bill Fletcher is a truth seeker and a truth teller – even when he’s writing fiction. Not unlike Bill, his character David Gomes is willing to put his life and career in peril to expose the truth. A thrilling read!” − Tavis Smiley, Broadcaster & NY TIMES Bestselling Author
|
|
VVAW: 50 Years
of Struggle
By Alynne Romo
While most books about VVAW focus on the 1960s and 1970s, this photo-with-text book provides a look at many of actions of VVAW over five decades. Some of VVAW’s events and its stands on issues are highlighted here in stories. Others show up in the running timelines which also include relevant events around the nation or the world. Examples of events are the riots in America’s urban centers, the murders of civil rights leaders or the largely failed missions in Vietnam.
Paul Tabone: This is a must read for anyone who was in the war, who had a loved one in the war, who is interested in history in general or probably more importantly for anyone who wants to see how we repeat history over and over again given the incredible idiot and his minions that currently occupy the White House. To my fellow Viet Nam veterans I say "Welcome Home Brothers". A must read for everyone who considers them self an American. Bravo.
|
|
|
A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project & Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity orders from carld717@gmail.com), or order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
|
|
|
|
Taking Down
White Supremacy
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
|
|
|
|
Photo: Joseph Goebbels (iStock)
'The Storm Is Coming...
By Steve Schmidt
The Warning
March 20, 2024 - I’m going to share something evil with you this morning, and I would like for you to consider reading every word of it slowly. In fact, I’d like for you to share it as well. “The Storm is Coming” was delivered by a man named Joseph Goebbels in July of 1932, a few weeks before the last German elections that would occur for 17 years.
Goebbels died with his wife Magda in a dank Berlin bunker after they poisoned their children. He shot himself in the head after killing his wife, who said she could not live in a world without national socialism.
The excerpts of the speech below speak for themselves. Perhaps it will help you understand the MAGA danger a bit better.
Can you find the denunciations of the globalists whom Goebbels called “internationalists?”
Can you find the calls for revenge?
Can you find the similarities?
I see them. I don’t believe I’m imagining them, but you tell me.
The Nazis' promised strength and prosperity. Instead, they shattered the world, but that came later.
Two years after this speech, Jews lost their German citizenship, property and rights.
Four years after this speech, an enthralled world came to the 1936 Berlin Olympics and many were dazzled.
Six years after this speech, the pogrom remembered as Kristallnacht swept Germany.
Seven years after this speech, Germany invaded Poland.
Ten years after this speech, the final solution to the Jewish question was settled at a 90-minute meeting in Wannsee, where the Holocaust was planned.
Fifteen years after this speech, Germany was destroyed. As many as 80 to 100 million people were dead around the world.
It is important to remember this speech was given 10 years before Joe Biden was born. The events that followed occurred within the lifetimes of hundreds of thousands of people who survived the death camps and are still alive.
There are 230 days left until the 2024 election, and there is confusion in the air about what to do about Trump. Should he be confronted relentlessly, or should he be ignored?
Perhaps the more important questions nine years into the Trump epoch should be at long last the following:
What is MAGA?
What will it become?
What does “dictator for a day” mean?
Maybe this speech helps:
Joseph Goebbels, 1932: The men of November [1918] took power by lying to the people, by telling them they had won. They promised you, workers, citizens and creative Germans, a Reich of freedom and beauty and dignity. They promised you socialism, they promised a people’s state, they promised the broad masses the fulfillment of their dreams — peace, work and prosperity.
We have lived this lie for 14 years. For 14 years we have worshpped this government; we have lived in want, suffered, sacrificed, starved, sometimes wept. And now we see the worst results of these 14 years: the German economy is in ruins, there are huge budget deficits, the nation’s fortune is squandered, people are robbed of their inheritance, people are desperate and without hope, the streets of our big cities are filled with an army of millions of unemployed, the middle class is vanishing, the farmers driven from their land. To our shame and disgrace large areas of German territory have been lost. Our territory is divided by the bleeding wound of the Polish corridor, and Germany is drained by a stupid and unnatural tribute payments
It is not hard to determine who is guilty, who bears the responsibility, to the people, to history and to God for these conditions. It is those men and the parties who have misled the German people for 14 years, promising them lives of beauty and dignity, of heaven on earth, but who in the end gave us empty words and stones instead of bread. They stand now before the court of the nation to give an account of the unparalleled disaster they have brought about in the last 14 years. Five weeks ago the last cabinet of this system fell. New men came on the political stage and declared that they had the goal of replacing the November System and setting Germany on a fundamentally new political course. You men and women know that we viewed this attempt with suspicion from the beginning. We see the resurrection of our people as coming not from a small clique that has no strong connection to the people; only a movement of millions has the active strength and the ability to change Germany….
You, men, women and comrades, are the bearers, witnesses, builders and finishers of this unique people’s uprising. Our policies have not been popular. We have served the truth, and only the truth. For twelve years, they have insulted and outlawed and slandered and persecuted us. Now that we are standing at the doorway to power, Marxist lies have joined with bourgeois weakness to fight us. Were we only a party like all the rest, we would collapse under the offensive of our opponents. But we are a people’s movement. That is our good fortune. Here and everywhere else in the land, the red shining Swastika flag flies over people of all camps, parties, classes, occupations, and religious confessions. Our opponents laughed at us in the past, but they laugh no longer.
You men and women standing before me, a hundred or two hundred thousand in number, with heads high, upright, proud and brave, the carriers of Germany’s future, in your eyes it is written:
We think no longer in terms of class. We are not workers or middle class. We are not first of all Protestants or Catholics. We do not ask about ancestry or class. Together we share the words of the poet:
“People, rise up, and storm, break loose!”
Comrades, men and women, fate has given us a last chance. We have one more opportunity to speak to the people. Our campaign spreads to all of Germany, and once again the ears hear, the eyes see, the heart beats faster and the senses clear:
“The day of freedom and prosperity is coming!”
So our dead comrade Horst Wessel wrote, and we are fulfilling his prophesy. The others may lie, slander, and pour their scorn on us — their political days are numbered.
Adolf Hitler is knocking at the gates of power, and in his fist are joined the fists of millions of workers and farmers. The time of shame and disgrace is nearly over.
You are the witnesses, the builders, the will-bearers of our idea and our worldview.
The party hacks of the Socialist Party are suddenly remembering the people. For a decade, the illustrated magazines pictured them only in frock coats and cylinder hats at tables filled with oysters and champagne bottles. Now they wear workers’ caps and fill their newspapers with urgings like “People, wake up!”
Well, we the people have awakened! We have risen against oppression, 15 million people have joined in an army of revenge.
Our answer: “The good old days of party bigwigs are over. A new Germany is coming, a Germany raised on the Spartan laws of Prussian duty. It is a Germany not grown fat, but one that is starving! It is a Germany with strength, with will, with idealism! It is a Germany that is done with Marxist betrayal and bourgeois white gloves.”
And you are the witnesses of this Germany. You, people, have affirmed this Germany. And we, people, speak in your name. We the leaders of this exciting movement of the millions, we come from you, the people. We too, comrades, were once unknown men marching with the gray masses. People, we have shared in our hearts your torture, your misery, your tribulations, your desperation. We are a piece of the people. When the bourgeois know-it-alls ask what we have accomplished, you, men and women, must save us from the necessity of giving answer. When they ask what we have done, you 15 million must answer: “They have given us faith once more, they have given us hope. They have awakened a sleeping Germany. They have organized and mobilized millions and set them to march. These millions are in motion, following the laws of history. Just as this small sect grew from seven unknown men to a movement of 15 million, so, too, I swear to you, will this movement of 15 million grow to encompass a people of 65 million.
The parties must go! The political hacks must be thrown out of their chairs. We will give no pardon. We will not allow Germany to sink into disgrace. We will give back to Germany a reason for its existence, a meaning to life. That is why you men and women are here, an army of two hundred thousand. Never has the Reich capital seen a popular movement of such force. You have come here from everywhere. The middle class has come from the west, the workers from the east and north. You have come from dark and joyless apartment houses. My S. A. comrades are before me, heads high, as if they were the kings of Germany. I know, comrades, that there are some among you who do not know where tomorrow’s meal will come from. We have shown these materialist party hacks that idealism is alive in Germany. We have shown them that even in the midst of hunger, sacrifice, and need, the people can be shown the way to betterment. We pledge loyalty to this people. We solemnly raise our hands and pledge:
As long as we breathe, we are obligated to the German people. We came from the people, and return ever to it. The people is the center of all things to us. We sacrifice for this people, and if necessary are ready to die for it.
Loyalty to the people, loyalty to the idea, loyalty to the movement, and loyalty to the Führer! That is our pledge as we shout:
|
|
CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
Remember Us for Gift Giving and Study Groups
Interested in Studying Gramsci? In a Serious way? We have a group that meets Sundays via Zoom, 11am-12:30pm, facilitated by Piruz Alemi. We go paragraph by paragraph, even line by line, reading aloud, then discussing, through The Prison Notebooks, using an online PDF. If you are interested contact Carl Davidson at carld717@gmail.com
|
|
Treat someone to a wonderful book.
And treat yourself, too!
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
|
|
History Lesson of the Week: The True Story of Pocahontas Is More Complicated Than You Might Think
Historian Camilla Townsend separates fact from fiction in the life of the Powhatan 'princess'
By Jackie Mansky; Updated by Sonja Anderson
The Smithsonian
Updated: February 20, 2024
John Smith claimed Pocahontas saved him from execution when she was just 11 or 12 years old. Whether the story happened the way Smith tells it—or even at all—is up for debate, a 2017 Smithsonian Channel documentary explains.
Pocahontas might be a household name, but the true story of her short, powerful life is buried in myths that have persisted since the 17th century.
First, Pocahontas wasn’t her actual name. Born around 1596 in present-day Virginia, she was really named Amonute, and she also had the more private name Matoaka. Pocahontas—which translates to “playful one” or “ill-behaved child”—was her childhood nickname.
Pocahontas was the favorite daughter of Powhatan, the formidable chief of more than 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes that lived in and around the area claimed by English settlers as Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Years later, when few firsthand witnesses were around to dispute his version of events, an English colonist named John Smith wrote about how Pocahontas, the beautiful daughter of a powerful Native leader, rescued him from execution at the hands of her father.
This narrative of Pocahontas turning her back on her own people and allying with the English, thereby finding common ground between the two cultures, has endured for centuries. But the truth of the matter was different from what Smith and mainstream culture say. And historians are divided over whether Pocahontas, then about 11 or 12 years old, rescued the mercantile soldier and explorer at all. Smith might have misinterpreted what was actually a ritual ceremony or even just lifted the tale from a popular Scottish ballad.
In 2017, 400 years after Pocahontas’ death in 1617, the Smithsonian Channel documentary Pocahontas: Beyond the Myth strove to tell its subject’s story accurately. In the film, authors, historians, curators and representatives of the Pamunkey tribe of Virginia, which descends from Pocahontas, paint a picture of a spunky, cartwheeling girl who grew up to be a clever and brave young woman, serving as a translator, ambassador and leader in her own right in the face of European colonization.
Camilla Townsend, author of the authoritative Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma and a historian at Rutgers University, is one of the experts featured in Beyond the Myth. To mark the documentary’s release in 2017, she talked to Smithsonian magazine about why Pocahontas’ story has been distorted for so long and why her true legacy is vital to understand today. Read a condensed and edited version of the conversation below. ...Read More
|
|
Ending Machismo Benefits Men Too
Mexico Solidarity Project News
from March 20, 2024
|
|
If women lack a voice, it’s not because we don’t have one. If we’re not making policy, it’s not for lack of leading ideas. If we lack rights, it’s not that we don’t deserve them. It’s that men don’t allow it.
Men have a big advantage over women: their experience using violence to get their way. From the early days of humankind, men learned to kill animals for food and to kill men from other tribes to expand their hunting grounds.
As Rafael Barajas/El Fisgón tells us, for women to take their rightful place alongside men — not behind them or under them — it’s men that need to change. They need to confront their own violent behavior. They need to understand machismo not as something to be proud of but as something that harms others and themselves.
Easier said than done! The attitudes and daily habits — the norms of society embedded in Mexico’s culture at least since the Spanish conquest — are in the air everyone breathes. As Fisgón says, for too many, machismo feels natural and defines what it means to be a Mexican man.
But women in and out of Morena, the party now governing Mexico, are making gains. They’re making gender parity the new normal, expanding reproductive rights, and demanding an end to femicide. Women resist and insist: hear our voices, experience our leadership, tap our power. Men, as much as women, gain from ending violence — and from doubling a nation’s potential. ...Read More
|
|
New Liberation Road
Booklets supporting the Mexico Solidarity Project
By Bill Gallegos
Liberation Road is the only major US revolutionary socialist organization that has a developed position on Chicano Liberation, and one of the few that understands and works to build solidarity with the socialist movements and revolutionaries of Mexico. Now we have something that explains those positions - a series of Liberation Road pamphlets entitled Adelante! (Forward!). The pamphlets were developed collectively by several comrades, with support from comrades outside the organization.
The articles are enhanced and enriched by the powerful art and culture that is a major component of the pamphlets. While Adelante! was introduced at the recent Mexico Solidarity tour of the Mexico Solidarity Project they are meant as important resources for all comrades of Liberation Road — to better understand our strategic perspectives on Chicano Liberation and Mexico Solidarity (internationalism), and to help us promote those perspectives in all of our mass and red work.
This has always been an important task for our organization, but now more than ever as the New Confederacy seems to have made immigration the center of their attack on democracy, equity, and social justice. In order to support comrades in understanding and advancing our strategic perspectives we are going to be conducting at least one webinar to discuss our line and how to integrate Adelante! in your work. Adelante! is a product of love comrades, an expression of the spirit element that Che Guevarra insisted is at the heart of every true revolutionary’s work. A link to download the booklets will be available by next week. Meanwhile, contact Bill Gallegos at billg4@gmail.com
|
|
|
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 updates, 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: Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix discuss Solidarity...60 min
|
|
Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical' |
This week's topic:
REVISITING THE POPULAR FRONT: CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF ANNE BRADEN
Harry Targ (a revised version of an original post on Tuesday, March 23, 2010)
Click the picture to access the blog.
|
|
Tune of the Week: Wallows - 'Calling After Me' ..3 min
|
|
Book Review: Why White Working Class Voters Have Embraced Trump
...Or Did They?
By Kelly Candaele
Hollywood Progressive
March 18, 2024 - A new book argues that the disappearance of private sector unions is part of the answer.
Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman argue in their new book Rust Belt Union Blues—Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away From the Democratic Party that an overlooked aspect of being in a union is the identity and personal meaning that unions provide. Unions, as Skocpol and Newman view it, are institutions that are potentially liberating rather than repressive. As jobs and unions disappeared in the industrial heartland—their book focuses on western Pennsylvania—the social and political vacuum was filled by alternative institutions—gun clubs and megachurches—that pushed former Democratic voters to the political right.
Political choices, Skocpol and Newman point out, are driven not just by policy issues or macroeconomic trends, but by “dense networks of interpersonal and community-level ties” that influence how workers and voters see themselves. For complex reasons, they found that the mostly male working-class whites in western Pennsylvania came to regard the Democratic Party as focused primarily on urban issues. At the same time, workers there felt that Democrats had lost or surrendered the ability to speak a language that appealed to their values and economic plight.
Skocpol and Newman combined research in union archives with on-the-ground interviews to examine how union communications affected their members’ social and political views. “Our history was wiped away,” one retired steelworker they interviewed said, decimating a strong “union man” narrative based on occupational pride and economic confidence.
Theda Skocpol is professor of government and sociology at Harvard University. Lainey Newman is a graduate of Harvard College and a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. They both spoke to Capital & Main from their homes in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Capital & Main: Lainey, your background is not that of a left-oriented activist or union person. Why did you become interested in the impact of the decline of unions?
Lainey Newman: I didn’t grow up in a left-wing activist family, but I had family members who were proud members of the United Auto Workers in Minnesota, where there is a pretty fierce tradition of union activism and commitment. When I came to Harvard, I wanted to understand why there was this political shift towards Trump, particularly in the rural areas outside of Pittsburgh where I had worked as a volunteer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. I started studying the intersection between industry, union membership and political affiliation in western Pennsylvania.
Professor Skocpol, what interested you in the work Lainey was doing?
Theda Skocpol: I grew up in an area of Michigan where unions were strong when I was young. In my career as a political scientist, I’ve been interested in social movements and in associations and organizations of various kinds and how they play a role in politics. But I had never had the chance to study unions or unionized workers. I had done some field work in western Pennsylvania on the changing politics of the Trump era.
“White union members moving rightward in their politics is partly due to a loss of union dues and membership. Unions can’t play a significant role in politics if unions are dwindling.” ~ Theda Skocpol
Your research focuses on western Pennsylvania and the disappearance of unionized manufacturing jobs. But you write about other things that disappeared along with the jobs that were very important. Talk about that.
Newman: The famous steel collapse happened in the 1970s and ’80s in western Pennsylvania. And for various reasons during the Carter administration there was plant closure after plant closure, so there was this ongoing barrage of job loss and community dissipation. What was lost was more than jobs; it was the identity and social fabric of these communities. These towns were singularly identified with the steel industry, not necessarily the steel corporations. They identified with being working people and union members. In these towns, all of that came crashing down.
The core of this book looks at how and why this area and others like it have been transformed from a unionized, Democratic Party stronghold to a center of support for Donald Trump. Talk about how you looked at this transformation in new ways.
Skocpol: We challenge the conclusion that because white, blue-collar workers in areas of industrial decline moved towards Republicans and Trump, that they have done so because of racism. Looking at previous scholarship over decades there is no case to be made that people are more racially prejudiced now than they used to be. Racism can’t explain the huge change that’s occurred among people who actually have become more accustomed to working hand in hand across racial and gender lines as blacks and women have become a more important part of the workforce. We looked at how people’s embedded lives have changed not just in their workplaces but in their communities. ...Read More
|
|
Film Review: In ‘Shirley,’ Regina King Gives Us the Queen of Underdog Political Campaigns
Revisiting Shirley Chisholm's 1972 campaign to be the Democratic nominee for president, this biopic gives the Oscar winner a chance to flex — and pays tribute to a disruptor
BY DAVID FEAR
Rolling Stone
MARCH 22, 2024 -ACTORS ARE DRAWN to biopics like moths to a particularly bright, often gold-tinted flame because it allows them to test their impressionistic mettle, to inhabit the real life of someone who’s often larger than life, to chart how an extraordinary human being is transformed into an emblem of their moment.
Audiences are drawn to biopics because we love actors, or at the very least we like seeing them trying to fill the shoes of these renowned figures and find the person beneath the symbolic purpose, shouted slogans, and prosthetic schnozzes. These movies are part history cosplay, part acting obstacle course.
Sometimes, the difference between IRL subject and performer gets blurred beyond recognition — there’s a very good chance that you imagine Sir Ben Kingsley’s version of Mahatma Gandhi when someone mentions the nonviolent activist. Ditto Robert De Niro/Jake La Motta, Coleman Domingo/Bayard Rustin, and Faye Dunaway/Joan Crawford.
No one is likely to conjure up Regina King in their mind’s eye if someone were to name-drop Shirley Chisholm, even after they’ve seen her portray the 1972 presidential candidate in write-director John Ridley‘s Shirley. That’s not to say that the Oscar winner doesn’t go all in on the former Brooklyn school teacher who became the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, then mounted a grassroots campaign to be the Democrat’s chosen nominee against Nixon.
When the word went out that King was going to play Chisholm in this look back at that revolutionary bid for the highest office, you felt a tingle of anticipation: What could an actor of her caliber do with a political barnstormer like Shirley? The answer is that King can give you her humor, her steel backbone, her savvy, her sense of righteousness, and her conviction that power really did belong to the people. She refuses to let Shirley’s signature glasses and pouffy hairdo do all of the heavy lifting.
It’s just that King is doing all of this within the confines of a movie that works better as a cultural restoration piece than a biographical drama, and the result is that Shirley becomes one more example of an emotionally committed performance in a good-enough film. If this gets one person to go — Wait, a Black woman ran for president? In the 1970s? Competing in the primaries against both party favorites and George “Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever” Wallace?! Tell me more! — then Ridley and King’s passion project will have done its job as a corrective. It’s an underdog tale worth retelling a million times over, a textbook example of a narrative in which personal victory is snatched from the jaws of seemingly endless defeats. You just wish this didn’t feel so dutiful in detailing that journey number by painted-in number.
Every Awful Thing Trump Has Promised to Do in a Second Term
Ripley does have an instinct for filmmaking grace notes, however, dropping in a number of arresting compositions (he loves uncentered framing and negative space) and low-key moments that complement what his star is doing. There’s an early sequence in which Chisholm is joining her class of Congress folk for a photo, and after she takes her place within the group, the camera pulls back and presents her as an island of Black female progressiveness within a sea of white patriarchy. It’s the sort of shot that seems obvious when you describe it and exquisite when you actually see it — Chisholm’s struggle against the establishment telegraphed in one beautiful, signifying image. ...Read More
|
|
522 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-6637
|
|
|
|
Is the content of this email relevant to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
:focal(2808x1872:2809x1873)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/bd/ad/bdad4ab3-7060-4946-b8a1-1091dfeefbf0/pocahontas1.jpg)
