Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism |
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April 5, 2024: The Week in Review
Using the Past to Define
the Future Is A Conflicted Task
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President Biden's recent phone call with Israel's Netanyahu brings two metaphors to mind: a 'can of worms' and 'Pandora's box.'
The first is largely about the past and the second is about the future. Both are highly problematic.
Both Biden and Bibi have presided over prolonged carnage. Biden backed George W. Bush in immediately declaring 'war' when 9/11 was a 'crime against humanity.' Two planes crashing into the Twin Towers were by non-state actors and those who carried out the deed all perished in doing so. However, the U.S. failed to pursue it as a crime, using the help of Interpol to bring those responsible to a court of justice. The result was 20 years of war against two countries that had nothing or very little to do with the actual deed. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and at war's end, Iraq is governed by allies of Iran. Afghanistan has the Taliban back in power, and the remnant of ISIS, created by the invasion of Iraq, is now an unwelcome presence back in remote areas of Afghanistan.
As for Israel, under the false banner of claiming 'a land without people for a people without land,' its various governments have been waging war with the Palestinian people living there, and in varying degrees, with their neighboring Arab allies, ever since 1948. The current Likud government, in practice, has been reasserting the original goal of making it a land for one people only, Jews from anywhere in the world, while killing, imprisoning, or 'transferring out' the indigenous population.
On Oct 7, 2023, Hamas launched an operation to enter Israel for several hours to kill 1200 Jews and capture just over 200 hostages. After unexplained hours of delay, Bibi declared 'war' rather than a crime, and vowed to liquidate Hamas. The result? Over 30,000 have died in Gaza so far, mostly children, and the population of Gaza faces a genocidal famine and the destruction of nearly all their homes and means of survival. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, has even suggested driving everyone from Gaza, then using bulldozers to level anything still standing, and commencing to building sea-front resorts and condos for Israelis.
So much for the can of worms. What about Pandora's box? Israel faces the same dialectic the U.S. faced in Vietnam and elsewhere. The more armed insurgents it killed, the more new insurgents joined the fight in more than a simple multiple of one. Hamas had about 30% approval in Gaza before Oct 7. It now has about 70% in the West Bank, where it had even less before. What does Netanyahu think all the surviving brothers, sisters, and cousins of all the children killed are going to think about Israel five or ten years from now?
In continuing to arm Israel, the U.S. has found itself utterly isolated in the world. Why does it cling to Israel? We know, or we should know by now, of all the imperialist and economic reasons for the U.S. thatbacking Israel in the first place. It was supposed to be our 'aircraft carrier on land' to protect U.S. interests in an oil-rich region while exercising hegemony over all the countries there who had turned or might turn to the USSR.
Now, the USSR is gone, and the Arab oil-producing countries have formed alliances of their own in a wider, nonaligned Global South. Still there are deeper reasons, going back to the can of worms. The U.S. and Israel are both settler states suppressing indigenous peoples. Due to numbers, technology, and military might, the U.S. won its 'Indian Wars,' even if much-reduced survivors continued to resist. But the territory of Israel is above half Jewish and half Palestinian, about 6 million each. And as Israel discovered in 1948, not all of them, by far, are going to be pushed out at the point of a gun. Neither side is going anywhere. So now it faces the ironic contents of Pandora's box: The earlier victims of a terrible genocide are now themselves engaged in genocide.
Here in the U.S. we also face the dilemma of the two boxes. On one hand, we face those who want to 'Make America Great Again.' On the other hand, we see others proclaiming 'We have always been great, and still are. We are the United States of America.'
But who has the better claim? In fact, there has always been 'Two Americas' on a common terrain. In a sheer time, the MAGA people can claim dominance in over 200 of 250 years since 1776, while the anti-MAGA people can claim some top status in about 50 of them, namely the years of multiracial democracy that pushed up from below, the Three Reconstructions--the first during and after the Civil War, the second from 1955 to 1975, and now the third beginning in 2008, but still vacillating.
What does this mean today? Both the U.S. and Israel face the common task of redefinition and reconstruction. To survive, Israel has to become a bi-national region with a state, federated or unitary, with equal rights for all peoples and religions. To survive becoming a fascist country with more wars on the horizon, the America of popular democracy has to defeat the Neo-confederacy of Trump, the America of war, slavery, and empire.
Neither of these is easy or guaranteed. But it's worth recalling the last item in Pandora's box after all the nasty Devils flew out: the Angel of Hope. When combined with optimism of the will, it might just see our third reconstruction go through to a new and much better order.
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WE ARE INVITING FEEDBACK!
Please send us your letters, comments, queries, complaints, new ideas. Just keep them short and civil. Longer commentaries and be submitted as articles.
DIFFICULTY READING US?
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We're going to try something new, and you are all invited.
Saturday Morning Coffee!
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!
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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.
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We’ve officially launched our NEW documentary, BEYOND BARS, and we’d like you and your community to host a screening for free! During an election year with over two million Americans currently incarcerated, BEYOND BARS exposes the continuing impact of white supremacy, all through the powerful story of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin and his family. Organize and mobilize with us!
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The Black Scholar Journal: Legacies and Futures
of Black Radicalism
April 6 & 7 2024
Roundtables: JoNina Abron-Ervin, Abdul Alkalimat, Sam Anderson, Herb Boyd, Melba Boyd, Horace Campbell, Bill Fletcher, Jr. , Jimmy Garrett, Gerald Lenoir, Jamala Rogers, Akinyele Umoja, Stan West
Paper presenters and topics:
Ray Black, Black Masculinity; Pedagogy and Education (two papers)
Mohamed Elnaiem, National liberation and decolonization
Julian Glover, Theories of Black genders and sexualities
Nicholas Grant, Anti-apartheid solidarity
Christopher J. Lee, Black engagement with Vietnam/Asia
Fred Moten, TBS Interviews and the poetics of the interview form
Joe Parrott, Global Third World/Tricontinental issues
Olufemi Taiwo, The Erasure of African knowledge in global discourse
Armond Towns, Media in Black studies, TBS, and contemporary society
E. James West, A Place Apart: The Black Scholar Writes Black Chicago
Daniel Widener, Internal colonialism, Cuba, TBS as a Black and Thirdworld space
Komozi Woodard, Malcolm X and Revolutionary Women: 21 Sisters in the Making of Black Liberation.
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A CONVERGENCE SYLLABUS
The strategy elaborated in this syllabus is aims to block MAGA’s bid for power and while doing so build enough independent progressive clout to start the country down the road to a robust multiracial, gender-inclusive democracy and an economy that works for all on an environmentally sustainable planet.
Convergence added a special session to this study to help participants grapple with the dramatic impact the Gaza crisis has had on US politics.
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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.
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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.
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Last Week's Saturday Morning Coffee
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News of the Week, Plus More
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Joe Biden Calls For ‘Immediate Ceasefire’ In Gaza
And Says Israel Must Protect Civilians To Keep US Support
US president also said Israel must implement a series of specific steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering and the safety of aid workers
By Lorenzo Tondo
The Guardian in Jerusalem
Apr 4, 2024 - Joe Biden has called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, telling Benjamin Netanyahu that future US support for Israel will depend on it taking concrete action to protect civilians and aid workers.
As the two leaders held their first phone call since Israeli airstrikes killed seven employees of the international food charity World Central Kitchen (WCK), Biden issued the strongest US rebuke toward Israel since the start of the conflict.
In Thursday’s call, which lasted less than 30 minutes, the US president “made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering and the safety of aid workers”, the White House said in a statement.
“He made clear that US policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.”
Biden said that an “immediate ceasefire is essential” and urged Israel to reach a deal with Hamas “without delay”, the White House said.
The statement marked a sharp change in Biden’s rhetoric and suggested, for what appears to be the first time, that strings could be attached to continued US support.
The call came as WCK called on Australia, Canada, Poland, the US and the UK, whose citizens were killed in the attack, to join an independent investigation of the incident.
“This was a military attack that involved multiple strikes and targeted three WCK vehicles,” the charity said in a statement. “All three vehicles were carrying civilians; they were marked as WCK vehicles; and their movements were in full compliance with Israeli authorities, who were aware of their itinerary, route and humanitarian mission.
“An independent investigation is the only way to determine the truth of what happened, ensure transparency and accountability for those responsible, and prevent future attacks on humanitarian aid workers.”
Biden’s comments were echoed by his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who said US support would be curtailed if Israel failed to adjust its conduct.
“If we don’t see the changes that we need to see, there will be changes in our policy,” he told reporters in Brussels.
“Right now, there is no higher priority in Gaza than protecting civilians, surging humanitarian assistance and ensuring the security of those who provide it. Israel must meet this moment,” he said.
The US has provided crucial military aid and diplomatic support for Israel’s nearly six-month offensive, which was launched in response to Hamas’s 7 October attack in southern Israel. ...Read More
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War on Gaza: We Were Lied into Genocide. Al Jazeera Has Shown Us How
Myth-busting documentary finally breaks the stranglehold of Israel and its western media acolytes over the story of what happened on 7 October
By Jonathan Cook
Middle East Eye
March 28, 2024 - For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, the western public had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.
Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia.
Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported.
Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation.
These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group.
The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities - from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.
The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.
What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings.
Whitewashing genocide
Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.
Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.
Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage for the latest on the Israel-Palestine war
Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.
Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months.
Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since.
The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide.
But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary.
It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media.
First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October - and those it did not - have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.
The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.
More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.
Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza - a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.
True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends. ...Read More
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Photo: Crowd of people posed with a long banner that reads "Solidarity." They're standing in front of a flat-roofed brick building, wearing T-shirts and shorts or pants. Crowd includes both men and women. Most appear to be white but a few are not.
Unions Show a Path To Deep Democracy—Even In Red States
'As more resources are invested in organizing in southern states, many more people have been getting a taste of a different way of being that is translating into breakthroughs we haven’t expected.'
This is the second in a series of reflections on the opportunities and challenges facing the labor movement this year. How can the movement use the momentum of 2023 to keep building power? How should it set its strategic compass? What kinds of organizing can help it navigate our shifting economy and rough political terrain?
By Melanie Barron
Convergence
April 1, 2024 - This year already has our movements on edge. In 2020 our directive was so clear. Living through four years of Trump created a palpable urgency around the election. Living through four years of Biden has been qualitatively different—less chaotic, sometimes lighter, with a shred more possibility. Those of us in labor are especially heartened by working with the most pro-worker National Labor Relations Board we’ve seen in some time.
With the same MAGA threat at hand in 2024, we appear rudderless after that hard-fought 2020 victory hasn’t been rewarded with more decisive power for the progressive Left. Heartbreaking images pouring out of Gaza remind us daily of the power imbalances our movements face in American democracy. We have mobilized relentlessly to stop the genocide—but although we’ve moved public opinion, we haven’t moved our leaders.
For many this moment has engendered a complete lack of faith in engaging with an inside-outside strategy. From where I sit, in the labor movement in Tennessee, I offer this: we’ve always been looking at a long game.
In 2024 we could see a qualitative shift in progressive movements’ approach to elections. Previous election years have drawn huge, persistent dividing lines in left circles as we rally around candidates we admire and fight it out in the primaries. This time, let’s put our differences aside for the general election, collectively focus on defeating our common enemy, the MAGA Right, and advance our forces within a pro-democracy front to weaken the fascists and create better conditions for ourselves.
We have to remember that achieving favorable electoral outcomes is not the end game in itself. In the process of organizing for the best outcomes we can muster in a world of limited options, we can position ourselves more powerfully to organize independently for the world we actually want.
Focus on state battlegrounds too
The White House is not the only battleground that matters. In states like Tennessee we have a hundred little Donald Trumps in our legislatures who pass bill after bill to restrict reproductive rights, attack trans people, undermine public schools, erode labor rights, deny voting rights, and more. At the same time, as more resources are invested in organizing in southern states, many more people have been getting a taste of a different way of being that is translating into breakthroughs we haven’t expected. This has meaningful implications for the prospects of investing capacity in states that might be otherwise written off as “impossible” or “hopeless.”
For example: in March 2023, a tragic mass shooting at a school in Nashville, TN, motivated thousands of people to flood the Tennessee Capitol for days to demand gun reform. Three legislators, Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, and Gloria Johnson—known as the Tennessee Three—led protests from the streets to the Capitol steps day after day, and together, took action on the House floor to push for meaningful reform.
These popular actions drew a shocking censure from their legislative colleagues. The entire country’s eyes were on Tennessee as the legislature voted to expel Jones and Pearson, two young Black legislators, from their democratically elected posts, while sparing Johnson, who is white. Jones and Pearson were able to win back their seats and continued to harness the movement built around gun control and advance the conversation around the stakes of the struggle for democracy in Tennessee. In that moment, they drew a clear line from the fights we wage around issues like gun control to the fight for democracy itself.
The Tennessee Three’s breakthrough represented decades of investment in movement capacity by everyday people organizing around all kinds of issues: workers’ rights, gender justice, environmental justice, and more. They are the faces of a growing movement for democracy and justice, cultivated by disciplined organizers, reaching hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans in their lives and workplaces, seeking to transform our state.
We know attacks will keep coming in 2024: they will as long as the Republicans remain in power. As urgent as the attacks on our people are, our movement will need to fight back while also keeping our eyes on the horizon. What if we set out on a multigenerational path to make every “red” state winnable? The path to overcoming the perpetual stalemate that is plaguing our country is to take a hard look at enemy strongholds and breakthrough. ...Read More
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On Union Actions Speaking Louder than Political Words
By Ike Gittlen
Ike's Work in Progress
APR 05, 2024 - Pollsters report we are a nation filled with anxious, angry, dissatisfied and fearful people. People are willing to grab on to anyone who promises to take us from where we are to a better place. A number of us are ready to swap our very freedoms for the promise of a fix to our displeasures.
While the pollsters are probing the American psyche, something else is happening that may well prove more useful than political theater or governmental actions. Union’s are actually attacking the root causes of our malaise, with an increasing degree of success.
These seemingly unconnected union actions are starting to look like a burgeoning trend. They portend an alternate path to the kind of nation that provides opportunity, equity and broad prosperity. A generally shared goal of most Americans.
My Union, the United Steelworkers, is in a battle with the massive arrogance of the US Steel/Nippon Steel global corporate combination. The USW is demanding financial guarantees for our members and the communities they work in. The Autoworkers, having taken the Big 3 to the mat, have declared war on automakers who have been exploiting southern workers. The smiling and allegedly subservient baristas at Starbucks are in the process of humbling the billionaires of coffee. Boeing Aircraft is facing its first strike in 16 years, as its workers refuse to be blackmailed anymore with threats of runaway work. A newly born union at Amazon, is taking on the richest man in the world. Across the country, unionists insist that any taxpayer money that goes out from the various infrastructure and industrial/manufacturing capacity legislation is awarded to companies that commit to fair and well-paid workforces. Working people, no longer waiting for political solutions, are using their unions to change the deal for us all.
It is noteworthy that these fights are not the traditional narrow ones over economics. While lifting pay is certainly a major goal, the demands workers are pursuing include quality of work life issues, workplace standards and a voice in decision-making. They openly are contesting long-held company strategies on foreign investment and the “Southern Strategy” that has been the modern equivalent to the plantation. In a very real way, the union movement is gathering itself to challenge the corporate design of globalization. It is this wealth-driven throat-hold on the nation that underlies our decline and divisiveness. While the political world makes promises, these efforts have already lifted working families and are building a force that can effectively change a lot that ails us.
The approach of union leaders is changing as well. Labor no longer talks in terms of economic improvements alone. They are appealing for solidarity based on a broad agenda that will put a leash on money and rebalance the power that working people need to assure we share in the bounty of this nation. They are calling out politicians who are fronts for unbridled greed. It’s bold, audacious and long overdue. And workers are responding.
The newly invigorated union movement hasn’t been lost on the public. Support for union actions has dramatically increased as have the number of Americans interested in being union. When we look closely at what is happening, we see common interests rising above individualism and negativity. Enthusiasm is high where labor is rising. Young people are sensing it’s a place for them to make their mark. While still constrained by organizing resources and anti-union pressures, workers continue to build and expand.
This is about exposing we have been fed a deception that is the reverse of how workers made gains in the past. An accurate reading of America’s history, shows that workers built collective power strong enough to force the political system to respond with legislation and respect. The New Deal, with its labor rights and protections, wasn’t bestowed on us by Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was responding to a movement that required him to give it legitimacy, or face a massive social breakdown. Workers building power and demanding a change in the rules of the game, is the way progress has been made in this nation. It is also the way working people have led the nation to a fairer and more equitable place. This is a critical lesson for America to re-learn. What it means is that we will have limited success in getting our political system to improve things unless we build the pressure and demands for it to do so.
To repeat what I said at the start, these are pieces of efforts that have yet to gel into a wholly-formed, organized economic and political alternative agenda. This movement is up against powerful and well-funded adversaries. To succeed it needs time to grow and convince us that our current environment is not one we have to wallow in. Yet, remarkably, with both success and setbacks, it is rising.
If we recognize that we’re not bound by the political world. That we can change the options being offered to us. That the principles of the labor movement are the basis for fixing what we need fixed. That we’ve had enough of the leadership of greed, and are open to leadership from those who actually do the work. That we forge alliances with allies and find ways to collaborate. Then we just might punch a hole in the pathetic “search for a savior” box we’ve been corralled into. And we might find a way to move forward using the positive energy that lurks within us all.
If you like these commentaries, join my blog for free at: https://ikegittlen.substack.com/ and share. Let’s see what we can build together. ...Read More
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Summer Lee: The Next, Most-Important Election of 2024
Victory for the excellent Squad member in her April 23rd primary is essential, as defeat portends the collapse of the Democratic Party’s winning coalition.
By Alan Minsky
Progressive Democrats of America Blog
All Democrats who hope to defeat Donald Trump in the Fall need to recognize the importance of the upcoming primary in Pennsylvania’s 12th District. Simply put, either Congresswoman Summer Lee triumphs over an opponent backed by right-wing money or Democrats will suffer a self-inflicted wound they may not recover from.
Every political analyst understands that Joe Biden’s razor-thin victory in the 2020 election was the product of high turnout among key constituencies: including Black women, progressives, and young voters.
Maintaining similar support from these three constituencies is essential to Biden’s re-election hopes in the fall.
That will not be easy if the centrist “mainstream’ wing of the Democratic Party sits idly by and allows Lee, a progressive first-term Black Congresswoman, to lose to an opponent already backed by GOP-money, who is looking for AIPAC to replicate what it did four years ago.
In 2022, AIPAC poured an unprecedented $4,000,000 into the race, mostly in the final days of the campaign, against the theretofore heavily favored Lee – who, fortunately, survived her primary by a razor-thin margin over a white male opponent.
Her leading opponent, Bhavini Patel, is in contact with AIPAC, clearly hoping they, along with other reactionary donors, will replicate their largesse in the homestretch, just like in 2022. (Keep in mind that many of AIPAC’s biggest donors favor a Trump victory in the fall. They know what they are doing.)
Suffice to say, allowing this to go unchallenged is not a good look for a Party which will ask for the votes of black women in the fall.
For many progressive and young voters, it could be unforgivable – as it will send a message that they are not welcome inside the Democratic Party.
Now, let me be crystal clear here, as the Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America, it is my job to fight for the inclusion of Progressives inside the party. In fact, we at PDA not only want, but think it would be best for the Democratic Party if the progressive wing became the dominant faction of the Party – for the simple reason that we support common sense policies that will benefit the vast majority of Americans and hence all of our society.
Young people on balance feel the same way. It is no secret that young voters overwhelmingly supported Bernie Sanders in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential races. It is also no secret that the establishment wing of the Party staunchly opposed Sanders – even as he emerged as the most popular politician in the country.
The squad are the political heirs of the Sanders movement, embracing the same economic and social policies. Just as important, for a generation of staunchly anti-racist young progressives, the Squad members are themselves young and 100% people of color.
A big question hangs over this reality. Will the mainstream of the Democratic Party accept or fight against the Squad? Do the politicians who represent the political hopes and dreams of the majority of young Americans – and of progressives as well – have a home inside the Democratic Party?
These questions are on the ballot in Pennsylvania’s 12th District primary. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand its implications for Joe Biden’s re-election hopes.
Of course, it’s even more than that.
Because of Gaza.
For the past few months, it has been a truism in American politics that the Biden re-election campaign was in trouble not only because Arab-Americans, who had also voted overwhelmingly for the President in 2020, vehemently opposed America’s blank check support for the Israeli government during the murderous months-long siege of Gaza, but also because progressives and young people felt the same.
If there’s a glimmer of hope for Democrats in this reality is that a handful of brave, ethical Members of Congress had the courage to do the right thing, oppose the Democratic Administration, and call for a ceasefire.
All of these Members were Democrats, and they were led by the Squad, including Summer Lee.
Now that the Biden’s Administration’s own policy is to call for a ceasefire (at least rhetorically), think how much better the world would be if they had listened to the Squad five months ago – it would be better for the state and people of Israel, for US standing in the world, and most importantly, of course, for the people of Palestine and Gaza. One of the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time would’ve been avoided, millions of people less traumatized, more than 100,000 never grievously injured and more than 30,000 innocent souls would still be alive.
Progressives, young people, Arab-Americans, and hundreds of Black clergy people understand this. They know who has shown great leadership. More than ever before they recognize Summer Lee and her fellow Squad members as their beacons in a time of darkness.
If Summer Lee is defeated in her April 23rd primary by a candidate who continues to seek the support of AIPAC, an organization that openly supports the continued slaughter in Gaza, prospects for Joe Biden and the Democrats will plummet. This is not a threat, but a warning, and a statement of fact.
For all that you love in life, please support Summer Lee for Congress in 2024.
But, hey, don’t take it from me. I asked four young politically-engaged people what it would mean to them if Summer Lee lost in her primary to an AIPAC-backed candidate:
- Losing Summer Lee would be devastating and extremely disheartening to young folks and would only contribute to a lower turn out this November among a population that has only increased its participation every election cycle. --Tyler Rivera, NY/NJ Metro
- By keeping progressives like Summer Lee in office, young folks not only see, in her, an elected willing to walk alongside and elevate the voices of the poor, working poor, and working class Americans in this country —she pushes us to envision ourselves in this righteous endeavor. We too can play a part of this revitalized progressive movement that not only resonates, but also wins. --Hartzell Gray, Host / KC Morning Show Podcast
- It’s no secret. When young people turn out, Democrats win. But, a generation that should have already been monopolized has instead become jaded and disillusioned as they watch their progressive champions face unprecedented backlash and record-shattering amounts of capital pouring in to support their opposition. In the Squad, in Summer Lee, young Americans finally saw themselves. They found a voice that speaks to their experiences and advocates the changes they wish to see in their communities. Super PAC and GOP-funded operations designed to protect the status quo will do nothing but alienate a generation already disinterested in electoral engagement. This political malpractice cannot be allowed to continue. The progressive movement cannot survive if our champions are continuously sacrificed by the establishment. Fear cannot motivate indefinitely, we must instead inspire. --William Walter, Germantown, WI
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Losing Summer Lee would be a massive step back for the progressive movement in this country. Over the last couple of election cycles, we’ve seen a resurgence of passion from younger demographics when it comes to lifting up progressive voices, but lately I’ve feared that the lack of significant legislative wins has made this voting base feel even further disillusioned with electoral politics. If we lose another strong progressive voice in congress, I see this momentum continuing to slip away as young voters lose hope of seeing their values contributing to the national conversation in a meaningful way. --Kendall Avenia, Kansas City, MO ...Read More
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Photo: The desire to belong is a fundamental human need. Oliver Rossi/Stone via Getty Images
Loneliness Can Kill, And New Research Shows Middle-Aged Americans Are Particularly Vulnerable
By Frank J. Infurna
The Conversation
April 5, 2024 - Middle-aged Americans are lonelier than their European counterparts. That’s the key finding of my team’s recent study, published in American Psychologist.
Our study identified a trend that has been evolving for multiple generations, and affects both baby boomers and Gen Xers. Middle-aged adults in England and Mediterranean Europe are not that far behind the U.S. In contrast, middle-aged adults in continental and Nordic Europe reported the lowest levels of loneliness and stability over time.
We used survey data drawn from over 53,000 middle-aged adults from the U.S. and 13 European nations from 2002 to 2020. We tracked their reported changes in loneliness every two years across the midlife years of 45 to 65. This span provided us data from the so-called silent generation of people born between 1937 and 1945; baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964; and members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1974.
Our study makes clear that middle-aged Americans today are experiencing more loneliness than their peers in European nations. This coincides with existing evidence that mortality rates are rising for working-age adults in the U.S.
One great story every day
We focused on middle-aged adults for several reasons. Middle-aged adults form the backbone of society by constituting a majority of the workforce. But they also face increasing challenges today, notably greater demands for support from both their aging parents and their children.
Following the Great Recession from late 2007 to 2009, middle-aged adults in the U.S. reported poorer mental and physical health compared to same-aged peers in the 1990s. Compared to several European nations, U.S. middle-aged adults currently report more depressive symptoms and higher rates of chronic illness, pain and disability.
Why it matters
The desire to belong is an innate and fundamental need. When this is lacking, it can have downstream consequences.
Loneliness is bad for your health. Researchers have found that loneliness is as dangerous as smoking. Loneliness increases one’s vulnerability to sickness, depression, chronic illness and premature death.
Loneliness is considered a global public health issue. The U.S. surgeon general released an advisory report in 2023 documenting an epidemic of loneliness and a pressing need to increase social connection. Other nations, such as the U.K. and Japan, have appointed ministers of loneliness to ensure relationships and loneliness are considered in policymaking.
You can be lonely even when surrounded by people.
Why are middle-aged Americans exceptional when it comes to loneliness and poorer overall mental and physical health?
We did not directly test this in our study, but in the future we hope to zero in on the factors driving these trends. We think that the loneliness Americans are reporting compared to peer nations comes down to limited social safety nets and to cultural norms that prioritize individualism over community.
Individualization carries psychological costs, such as reductions in social connections and support structures, which are correlates of loneliness. Relative to the other nations in our study, Americans have a higher tendency to relocate, which is associated with weak social and community ties.
One of the reasons why we chose countries from across Europe is that they differ dramatically from the U.S. when it comes to social and economic opportunities and social safety nets. Social and economic inequalities likely increase one’s loneliness through undermining one’s ability to meet basic needs. Generous family and work policies likely lessen midlife loneliness through reducing financial pressures and work-family conflict, as well as addressing health and gender inequities.
Our findings on loneliness in conjunction with previous studies on life expectancy, health, well-being and cognition suggest that being middle-aged in America is a risk factor for poor mental and physical health outcomes.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. ...Read More
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ILLUSTRATION BY HOWARD BARRY
A 32-Hour Workweek Is Ours for the Taking
The fight for shorter hours can unify workers everywhere.
By Sarah Jaffe
In These Times
April 2, 2024 - The United Auto Workers won many of their demands in their groundbreaking, six-week strike in 2023, but one of them — despite not making it into their new contracts with the Big Three automakers — has the potential to radically shift organized labor’s priorities and unify an often fractious movement in ways not seen in decades.
The demand is for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay. From the beginning of the strike, the audacious proposal captured public attention beyond the usual labor watchers because it upends decades-old expectations of what unions should want, signaling the working class has priorities beyond simply holding onto jobs.
The autoworkers had struck at General Motors in 2019, but despite plenty of energy from the rank and file, a doomed leadership led a lackluster action to a contract that was half-heartedly accepted. Before that, it had been decades of concessions.
But in early 2023, democratic reforms in the union swept a new leadership team, under President Shawn Fain, into power with the slogan ?“No Corruption. No Concessions. No Tiers.” Two-tier status had been a central grievance since the UAW accepted a lower tier for new hires during rampant deindustrialization. At the time, they were told the lower tier was necessary to keep jobs at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler (now owned by Stellantis). But the companies came screaming back to profitability, and workers on the lower tier were still making less for the same work than their more-senior colleagues.
At that time, mass layoffs or concessions weren’t the only ideas floating around, just the ones that won out politically. Economist Dean Baker suggested in articles during the Great Recession that the government subsidize companies to shorten the workweek, spreading the work among more workers and hiring, rather than firing, during the recession. The Obama administration didn’t bite, unions largely didn’t get on board, and we got a long, slow recovery.
The Covid crisis put the issue of working time back on the table. Many ?“essential” workers — including a wide swath of manufacturing employees— worked forced overtime and risked their lives and health. Across the country and the world, they decided enough was enough.
“It really made people reflect on what’s important in life,” Fain told me in January. Workers were deciding, he said, that working 12-hour days, seven days a week, cobbling together multiple jobs to scrape by ?“is not a life.” And so the shorter hours demand made its way from grumbling workers to the UAW’s strike demands to major headlines (“Why a four-day workweek is on the table for automakers,” among so many others).
It was ?“like a bolt out of nowhere,” said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist of work at Boston College who has researched and advocated for shorter hours for decades. ?“It legitimated [the demand] hugely.” Suddenly, New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum was endorsing the call and urging President Joe Biden to act on it for workers across industries. ?“Americans spend too much time on the job,” Appelbaum wrote. ?“A shorter workweek would be better for our health, better for our families and better for our employers.”
Fain told me that, initially, the UAW was ?“laughed at, basically, when we put it out there.” Ford CEO Jim Farley complained to CNN that ?“if we had done that [four-day week]. … We would have gone bankrupt many years ago. … We’d have to close plants and most people would lose their jobs.”
In other words, it’s not a complete shock that the 32-hour week was not in the contracts the union won. But Fain doesn’t see it as a mere bargaining chip. Rather, it’s the start of a long-term strategy for the union, one he hopes the rest of labor will pick up: ?“I really felt it was imperative to get the dialogue going again, to try to fight for a shorter workweek and get the public thinking along those lines.”
Work-life balance was on the autoworkers’ minds as the union prepared for bargaining — long hours, overtime (whether voluntary or forced) and the ongoing mental health crisis.
“The ability for an autoworker to provide for a family or even oneself has been more and more difficult,” Charles Mitchell, a veteran Stellantis worker in Detroit, told The Guardian. ?“All the while companies are becoming more profitable and making shareholders richer while forcing mandatory 60- to 70-hour workweeks in assembly plants.”
“Our work lives and the conditions in this nation, in this world, are what lead to a lot of these mental health issues,” Fain said. ?“Jobs should bring dignity to people.” Too many people, he said, labor constantly, with no time off for their families or friends or ?“just pursuing things that you love doing.” People lose hope, he said, when all they do is work.
When he’s talking to high school students at the union’s training center, he talks about the fact that work is a process of selling your time: ?“The greatest resource that we have on this earth is a human being’s time.” The right wing, he noted, talks about a ?“right to life” when they’re talking about abortion, but that isn’t the kind of right to life he means. ?“That’s a right to birth. They don’t give a damn about life,” he continued. What he wants is ?“a real right to life, valuing a human being’s time, valuing their health and not just when they’re born, but after they’re born and when they get old and are too old to work, too young to die.”
ESSENTIALLY EXPOSED BY COVID
The AFL-CIO adopted a resolution two years ago reasserting that shorter hours should be a priority for the federation that represents 12.5 million workers and they would ?“aggressively take up the fight for a shorter workweek and earlier retirement.”
Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, introduced that resolution on behalf of his 200,000-member union. When we spoke after the new year, he told me, ?“The collective bargaining process gives unions an opportunity to raise this question up. There are other ways too, such as legislation, working with allies, taking it to the streets and so on.”
Just as Fain found lessons in Covid, Dimondstein noted the global pandemic brought us new language about postal workers and so many other working people, one that perhaps unintentionally inspired a new militancy on the shop floor: ?“We are essential, we are key and we deserve better.”
Schor, too, saw that new common sense everywhere. When her book The Overworked American first came out in 1991, the conversation was very different, but now, she said, it seems people think, ?“It’s too much. What’s happened to us, the people in this country? We’ve been asked to do something that’s not fair. People are exhausted.”
During the pandemic, as I have written many times, workers realized their bosses didn’t care if they died. ?“We lost a lot of members that went to work and caught Covid and died, and one worker dying, that’s one too many,” Fain told me. ?“But meanwhile, the leadership of the Big Three, they’re working from home for two and three years.”
Pushed not just to keep working but to do so for longer hours in more dangerous conditions, many workers began to push back. Even before the pandemic, Donna Jo Marks, a worker at Nabisco’s plant in Portland, Ore., explained, they’d worked 12 days on, then two days off. But once Covid hit, she said, ?“Sometimes we would work 28 days straight and everyone above us thought, ?‘Oh, well, you guys are getting compensated for it,’ — but at what cost?” For a little while, they got $2 an hour extra hazard pay, she said, but that stopped after a few months. ?“It just was an ugly time and people were tired and it wasn’t safe.” ...Read More
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Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture: |
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(Courtesy God & Country)
When Faith Meets Fascism
Producer Rob Reiner and director Dan Partland discuss the rise of Christian nationalism and their new film God & Country.
By Laura Flanders
The Nation
Mix religion up with a macho, messianic form of white nationalism, and you get a toxic brew—one that’s dangerous not only to the very idea of secular democracy but also to Christianity itself.
History has seen crusades before, but today’s Christian nationalism is posing a real and immediate threat. In God & Country, a new documentary based on the book The Power Worshipers by Katherine Stewart, director Dan Partland and producer Rob Reiner look at the phenomenon of Christian nationalism, with insights from scholars and activists as well as Christian leaders like the Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign.
Reiner came to fame as an Emmy Award–winning actor in the TV series All in the Family. He went on to become an acclaimed director of some of the most popular motion pictures in American history, including When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride. He’s also a dedicated political activist. Dan Partland is a longtime documentary producer and director for film and television. He is a five-time Emmy nominee with two Emmys for best nonfiction series, including one for American High on Fox. —Laura Flanders
Laura Flanders: I learned a lot from this film. For one thing, the huge role that Christian Nationalists played in the January 6 insurrection. What do we need to know about what happened the night before, January 5?
Dan Partland: The insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 was basically a Christian nationalist uprising—which is not to say that everybody there was a Christian nationalist, but it was a unifying theme. It wasn’t a coincidence that all of those people were at the Capitol that day. There were churches and a lot of conservative Christian groups organizing protests to bring people to the Capitol on January 5. They had done this a bunch of times prior with something called the Jericho Marches. The idea of the Jericho Marches was to symbolize, in Christian terms, the taking down of the government. The story of Jericho is that the walls come crumbling down. It was well-known, highly publicized within certain Christian circles that the event on the 6th was going to be an effort to block the certification of the election.
LF: American as baseball and apple pie, is it? Christian nationalism?
Rob Reiner: Christianity is certainly a part of the fabric of America. There’s no getting around that. The problem with Christian nationalism is they claim that America should be a Christian nation. That it was founded to be a white Christian nation. We know, based on our Constitution, very clearly there is a separation of church and state. To say that Christian nationalism—which is a political movement, not a religious movement—should be tied into what is American is a little misleading.
LF: What makes the Christian nationalism of today different from the conservative religious movements we’ve known in the past?
DP: The current Christian nationalist movement, which as Rob said is a political movement and not a faith, has become the dominant expression of Christianity in America. That’s what’s really scary. It represents a danger not just to American democracy because of the ways in which they can use both democratic and antidemocratic means to try to implement this Christian agenda into law but also a danger to church itself because of the ways that it’s co-opting the idea of what Christianity is about and undermining the central tenets of the faith.
RR: We have experts in the film, very conservative, devout Christians, leaders, thinkers, pastors, who talk about how this movement is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. That’s what you have to focus in on, because the idea that you could promote a political agenda in the name of God and that would give you permission to resort to any means to get what you want, up to and including violence we saw on January 6, is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, which is love thy neighbor, do unto others, and so on.
LF: How big is this movement?
RR: Christian nationalism, the way we talk about it in the film as this political movement, is not the majority. It is far from the majority. But because of the way our system works, a very virulent minority can control our politics—and that’s what they’ve done. They’ve figured out a way to take this movement, which is very well-funded, very well-organized, much more so than when it started back in the ’50s. They’ve funneled this organization into Donald Trump, and he is their spokesperson for this. You can gain a tremendous amount of power with maybe 20, 25, 30 percent of the populace.
LF: Dan, as you think about the work you hope this film will do, who are you trying to reach?
DP: There’s a lot of people, American Christians, who are starting to really be ill at ease with the overall direction of their political leanings, of their church, of this movement in general. They’ve been swept up in it. So we’re definitely interested in reaching those people, because I think those people are reachable.
RR: We want religious groups, church groups to take a look at it and share it with their flock and talk to each other. How do you feel about this movement? Is it representing true Christianity? We want that discussion to proliferate. We’re seeing the rise of autocracy and theocracy around the world, and it’s a clarion call to say this can happen here. If democracy crumbles, then it portends a danger throughout the world.
LF: There is something about evangelicalism that I respect, which is that within certain boundaries they do believe that people can be changed, saved, rescued, converted.
DP: It’s wrong to think of Christian nationalism as a light switch that’s either on or off. You’re a Christian nationalist, you’re not. The way most of the scholarship views this is really a spectrum. Some of the best research on this classifies groups ranging from what they call ambassadors of Christian nationalism, who firmly believe this is a Christian nation and should be reflected that way in law. The next tier is accommodators, resisters, and then rejectors. In this top class of ambassadors, those are probably most of the people we’re talking about when we say Christian nationalists. ...Read More
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Trump’s Backers Are Determined Not to Blow It This Time Around
By Thomas B. Edsall
New York Times Columnist
April 3, 2024 - In a rare display of unity, more than 100 conservative tax-exempt organizations have joined forces in support of Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda, forming a $2 billion-plus political machine.
Together, these organizations are constructing a detailed postelection agenda, lining up prospective appointees and backing Trump in his legal battles.
Most of the work performed by these nonprofit groups is conducted behind closed doors. Unlike traditional political organizations, these groups do not disclose their donors and must reveal only minimal information on expenditures. In many cases, even this minimal information will not be available until after the 2024 election.
Nonprofits like these are able to maintain a cloak of secrecy by positioning themselves as charitable organizations under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code or as social welfare organizations under section 501(c)(4).
Not only are these tax-exempt organizations attractive to large contributors who want to keep their roles secret; 501(c)(3) groups have an added benefit: Donors can deduct their gifts from their taxable incomes.
The benefits don’t end there. The minimal reporting requirements imposed on political nonprofits lend themselves to self-dealing, particularly the payment of high salaries and consulting fees, and the award of contracts to for-profit companies owned by executives of the charitable groups.
“The growth of these groups is largely flying under the radar,” Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, wrote by email in response to my inquiry. “This level of coordination is unprecedented.”
Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, replying by email to my inquiry, wrote, “These are detailed plans to take full control of various federal departments and agencies from the very start and to use every power available to implement radical ethnonationalist regulations and action plans.”
This activity, Skocpol continued, amounts to a “full prep for an authoritarian takeover, buttressed by the control Trump and Trumpists now have over the G.O.P. and its apparatuses.”
In this drive by the right to shape policy, should Trump win, there are basically three power centers.
The first is made up of groups pieced together by Leonard Leo, a co-chairman of the Federalist Society, renowned for his role in the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court and of many key posts in the federal and state judiciaries.
If cash is the measure, Leo is the heavyweight champion. Two years ago, my Times colleagues Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher disclosed that a little-known Chicago billionaire, Barre Seid, who made his fortune manufacturing electronic equipment, turned $1.6 billion over to the Marble Freedom Trust, a tax-exempt organization created by Leo in 2021, helping to turn it into a powerhouse.
The second nexus of right-wing tax-exempt groups is the alliance clustered on Capitol Hill around the intersection of Third Street Southeast and Independence Avenue — offices and townhouses that fashion themselves as Patriots’ Row.
Former Trump campaign aides, lawyers and executive appointees, including Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller, Edward Corrigan and Cleta Mitchell, run these organizations. After Trump was defeated in 2020, the cash flow to these groups surged.
The third center is coordinated by the Heritage Foundation, which, under the leadership of Kevin D. Roberts, who assumed its presidency in 2021, has become a committed ally of the MAGA movement.
Heritage, in turn, has created Project 2025 in preparation for a potential Trump victory in November. In a statement of purpose, the project declared:
It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day 1 of the next conservative administration.
There are more than 100 members of Project 2025, and they include not only most of the Patriots’ Row groups but also much of the Christian right and the anti-abortion movement.
In the view of Lawrence Rosenthal, the chairman and founder of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, the convergence of so many conservative organizations leading up to the 2024 election marks a reconciliation, albeit partial, between the two major wings of the Republican Party: the more traditional market fundamentalists and the populist nationalists.
“In 2024,” Rosenthal wrote by email, the free-market fundamentalists are making their peace on a more basic level than simply tax cuts. Their historic long-term goal — rolling back the federal government to pre-New Deal levels — corresponds to the nationalists’ goal of “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
This is what the likes of the now thoroughly MAGA-fied Heritage Foundation is putting together. Recasting the administrative state as the “deep state,” a veritable launchpad for conspiracy-mongering innuendo, easily brings the populists along for the ride despite a “What’s the Matter With Kansas”-like abandonment of their own economic interests on the part of a sector of the population particularly dependent on the range of targets like Social Security and Medicare that the administrative-state deconstructors have in their sights.
In return the populists are seeing avatars of Christian nationalism in unprecedented roles of political power — to wit, the current speaker of the House.
The populist-nationalist wing has an agenda that “goes beyond what the free-market fundamentalists have had in mind,” Rosenthal continued:
The model here is by now explicitly Orbanism in Hungary — what Viktor Orban personally dubbed “illiberal democracy.” By now, MAGA at all levels — CPAC, media, Congress, Trump himself — has explicitly embraced Orban. Illiberal regimes claim legitimacy through elections but systematically curtail civil liberties and checks and balances, structurally recasting political institutions so as to make their being voted out of office almost unrealizable. ...Read More
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Workers assemble Volkswagen Passat sedans at the German automaker’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, June 12, 2013. ERIK SCHELZIG/AP PHOTO
How Everything Changed at Volkswagen in Chattanooga
This union drive by the UAW looks very different from two other attempts in 2014 and 2019.
By Mike Elk
The American Prospect
March 28, 2024 - On a cold, drizzly Valentine’s Day in 2014, I spent the night at a UAW party at the old wood-paneled IBEW hall next to Chattanooga’s brand-new Volkswagen plant as workers eagerly awaited union election results.
One Volkswagen worker passed around a moonshine bottle as nearly 200 people crammed the union hall. The energy was lit as people seemed optimistic that the union would win.
“I am excited,” Volkswagen worker Justin King told me as he was putting on his cowboy boots to get ready for the party.
Earlier in the evening, at his house in Orchard Knob, labor and community organizer Michael Gilliland was nervous. Something seemed off; Chattanooga had been blanketed with unprecedented anti-union TV ads, and support for the union had dissipated quickly in the final days.
The party at the IBEW hall quickly died when the vote was announced as 626 for the union and 712 against.
Instead of drinking that moonshine and celebrating a historic union victory in the South that Valentine’s Day, I sat in a freezing car in Volkswagen’s parking lot with veteran New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse, trying to make sense of what went wrong.
In 2019, I again traveled to Chattanooga, hoping the UAW could win there. They had been fighting for five years as a minority union and organizing shop-floor actions, winning some changes for workers. I hoped that maybe this time, I would get to attend a raucous victory party of UAW workers.
However, Michael Gilliland was pessimistic. The corruption scandal around the UAW was growing, and the anti-union forces in town once again blanketed the city with hundreds of thousands of dollars in anti-union ads.
Sadly, once again, he was right, as the union lost by a margin of 776-833.
Now, for the first time in decades, I have seen Gilliland, who heads the community labor organization CALEB (Chattanooga in Action for Love, Equality, and Benevolence), optimistic about the chances of the UAW winning at Volkswagen.
After the pandemic and the ensuing strike wave, which saw more than 3,000 strikes since 2020, and the success of the Stand Up Strike, Gilliland feels that the atmosphere has completely changed in the community.
“I think that there’s an energy that most likely comes from the momentum that was created last year, with the Big Three win being so recently victorious, and to be able to show those comparisons of bargaining with the Big Three,” says Gilliland. “It creates a lot of opportunity to think about what those changes might look like in concrete terms for workers on the line.”
In 2014, when the UAW first tried for an election, anti-union forces put recent concessions by the UAW as evidence that Volkswagen had little to unionize for.
As part of the auto bailout in 2009, new hires under UAW contracts at GM made $16.50 an hour. During the 2014 UAW election, new non-union assembly line workers at Volkswagen started at $14.50 an hour, which, with cost-of-living differences between Tennessee and the Midwest factored in, is arguably slightly higher.
“What the UAW is offering, we can already do without them,” anti-union Volkswagen worker Mike Burton, who created the website for the “No 2 UAW” campaign, told me in 2014.
The union ultimately lost that vote in 2014 by a narrow margin of only 626 for the union to 712 against. As I wrote for the New York Times at the time, “Many Chattanooga workers had trouble seeing the upside of joining the U.A.W.”
In 2019, when the UAW tried for a union election again, the UAW felt much more optimistic. However, at the time, the UAW was accused in the press of corruption charges as several senior UAW officials had already pled guilty to accepting bribes from their employers.
Hammered with captive audience anti-union meetings and hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV ads highlighting the union’s corruption, the union once again lost by a margin of 776 for the union to 833 against.
“There was actually a corruption scandal with UAW,” says 34-year-old Volkswagen worker Zach Costello. “All you would hear about is corruption, corruption, corruption.”
A few months after the election, several of its top leaders, including UAW President Gary Jones, were arrested for accepting bribes from employers, validating the distrust many Volkswagen workers had of the UAW.
The federal government would eventually intervene and force the UAW to accept a consent decree that opened space for union reformers.
As part of the consent decree, the UAW was forced to hold a referendum on whether rank-and-file members should be allowed to vote directly for the UAW’s president or elect a president through a complex and opaque system of delegates, which the UAW had used for 80 years.
UAW members voted overwhelmingly to have their president directly elected by referendum. In 2023, reformer Shawn Fain was elected president, defeating incumbent Ray Curry, the first time an incumbent president had been defeated in the history of the UAW.
Fain immediately moved to take the union on a more militant footing. In September of 2023, Fain led his union in a series of escalating strikes against factories owned by all of the Big Three, the first time in the history of the UAW that the union had struck at all three automakers simultaneously.
The union won impressive wage gains of at least 25% at all three big employers. The union then decided to use that momentum to launch an ambitious $40 million organizing effort at non-union auto manufacturers in the U.S. South.
Non-union employers responded frantically, with Volkswagen offering workers an 11% wage increase this year in the hopes of fighting off a union drive there. It wasn’t enough to dissuade workers.
A National Campaign Instead of Isolated Battles
The UAW launched a nationwide organizing effort. In addition to filing for a union election at Volkswagen, the UAW has announced that a majority of workers at Mercedes in Alabama have signed up to join the union. Public union campaigns have also been launched at Hyundai in Montgomery, Alabama, and Toyota in Troy, Missouri.
If workers win in Chattanooga, it will likely give momentum to those other union campaigns, creating unprecedented momentum for union organizing in the anti-union South. ...Read More
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Photo: Former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou (left) arrives in Shenzhen on Monday at the start of an 11-day mainland trip. Photo: Xinhua
Ma Ying-jeou Calls For Both Sides of Taiwan Strait to Work Together and ‘Avoid War’
- Ex-Taiwanese president makes the remarks at Sun Yat-sen’s former residence on second day of mainland tour
- He also visits headquarters of BYD Auto with Beijing official on Tuesday, following stops at DJI Technology and Tencent
By Amber Wang in Beijing
South China Morning Post
April 2 2024 - Former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou has called on the two sides of the strait to work together and “avoid war” on the second day of his mainland China tour.
Ma, a senior member of the Beijing-friendly opposition Kuomintang, made the remarks during a visit to the former residence of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, in the Guangdong city of Zhongshan on Tuesday.
Citing Sun’s last words – “peace, struggle, save China” – Ma said he hoped “both sides of the Taiwan Strait can work together, avoid war … and jointly create peace and prosperity”, according to a statement from Ma’s office.
Reflecting on Sun’s pursuit of a China with “freedom, unity, equal wealth”, Ma said people on both sides of the strait “belong to the Chinese nation”.
“Many of the founding propositions that Sun Yat-sen had in mind back then have now been realised in Taiwan and the mainland respectively,” he said. “This is crucial to the lives and well-being of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and future generations.”
Ma is on an 11-day mainland trip that he has called a “journey of peace”. He is expected to meet President Xi Jinping next week.
The visit comes ahead of Taiwanese president-elect William Lai Ching-te’s inauguration on May 20, which could bring more uncertainty to already strained cross-strait ties. Beijing has branded Lai, of the Democratic Progressive Party, as a “separatist” and “troublemaker”.
Ma arrived in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen on Monday, visiting DJI Technology, the world’s largest consumer drone maker, and social media and gaming giant Tencent. He also visited electric vehicle maker BYD Auto on Tuesday.
The visits come as Beijing is pushing for more hi-tech development, as China’s rivalry with the US intensifies.
At the headquarters of BYD – which overtook Tesla as the world’s top seller of EVs at the end of last year – Ma asked Song Tao, who heads the Taiwan Affairs Office, about the global race for technologies and the mainland’s policy support in the sector.
“[We] have confidence that [other countries] will never be able to chase us,” Song told him, according to Taiwanese media. He added that Beijing’s most effective industry support policies in recent years were those related to EVs.
China has one of the fastest-growing EV markets in the world, accounting for around 57.4 per cent of global production. Electric vehicles were also one of the sectors identified in the government’s annual report this year as being in need of a “new leap forward”.
Visiting DJI on Monday, Ma raised the sensitive issue of the use of its drones in the war in Ukraine. A company employee told him that they “cannot restrict” such usage, Taiwanese media reported. DJI halted the sale of its drones in Ukraine and Russia in April 2022, but they reportedly continue to be used by both sides in the conflict.
DJI was added to the US export control list in December 2020, with the Department of Commerce accusing it of being complicit in the oppression of the Uygur minority in Xinjiang and aiding the Chinese military.
Ma is leading a group of 20 students on the trip. They will spend three days in Guangdong province and will also travel to Shaanxi and Beijing.
Ma will reportedly meet Xi next Monday, but neither side has confirmed the meeting. Ma and Xi last met in Singapore in 2015 – the first such summit since the two sides split in 1949.
Beijing sees self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory to be brought under mainland control, by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise Taiwan as independent but are opposed to any unilateral change of the cross-strait status quo by force. ...Read More
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New Journals and Books for Radical Education...
Use Changemaker for Your Holiday Gifts,
Thus Lending Us a Hand, Too!
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Taking Down
White Supremacy
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
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Failures of the Reconstruction (1860-1920)
A discussion with Manisha Sinha, whose new book,
"The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic,"
is now the definitive work on the most consequential period of American history.
By Greg Olear
Prevail
APR 05, 2024 - Manisha Sinha, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction.
She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University, where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico and featured in the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Her multiple award winning second book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction.
Her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, offers a fresh, expansive, and timely take on the most consequential—and arguably the most misunderstood—period of American history. It’s impossible to understand the United States without understanding Reconstruction, and yet the subject is often given short shrift in high school history classes. And even the authoritative work on the subject, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, ends in 1877 and thus doesn’t get into the critical events of the rest of the 19th century.
Enter Manisha Sinha. Her book is, simply put, an instant classic: the new definitive work for the period. She shows the United States at the time in all its complexity, weaving together the various historical threads—the traditional Reconstruction period, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and its program of domestic terror, Grant forming the DOJ, the election of 1876 that ended the occupation too early, the conquest of the West, the labor movement, and so on—in a way that makes us better understand why we are the way we are. Also: this is not one of those Howard Zinn-style history books where the author is all, “America sucks.” Far from. There are plenty of heroes from this time period, and their courage and determination is just as inspiring as the overt racism and sadistic violence of the former Confederates is horrifying.
Here are three takeaways from our discussion:
The election of 1876 was more pivotal to American history than I ever realized.
Booth killed Lincoln in 1865, after the war, right at the start of Lincoln’s second term. That elevated Andrew Johnson, a contemptible white supremacist and Confederate sympathizer, to the White House. He was the anti-LBJ. He wanted the policy of racism to continue, and thus sought the approval of all the hateful scoundrels—like Elon Musk does on social media. And almost everyone in Washington flat-out despised him for his obdurate stupidity. It was like going from Obama to Trump—whose similarities to Johnson Sinha wrote about in 2019 in the New York Times.
Johnson gave way to Ulysses S. Grant, a fine man but a so-so president, who must have been physically and existentially exhausted by his second term. Then came 1876, which pitted Samuel J. Tilden, a Democrat—which in those days mean racist Confederate apologist—against Rutherford B. Hayes, a Lincoln Republican. Hayes lost the (suppressed) popular vote but prevailed in the Electoral College. The thinking was that he would continue Reconstruction and continue Lincoln’s project. But he didn’t. As soon as he took office, he pulled federal troops out of the South, throwing the emancipated Black Americans living there to the proverbial wolves.
Sinha explains:
- All that leads to the fall of a formal commitment by the federal government to upholding these Reconstruction governments. So whether there was a formal compromise of 1877 or not—I’ll let other historians keep disputing that—I do know what the results were. And the results were that Hayes is in power, and that Democrats take over the last states in the South, which they had systematically started doing already in 1870.
- So, you know, what we need to understand about Reconstruction is how short-lived it was. It’s a very short period. It’s not even 1865 to 1877, because many Southern states have already been restored. (I don’t like to use the term “redeemed,” with all of its kind of fundamentalist religious overtones, that many white Southerners used at that time.) They’re restored to sort of elite undemocratic rule. And certainly African Americans have been…systematically and violently put out of the body politic. So, you know, that is an important landmark in the start of the complete unwinding of Reconstruction.
- Because then after 1877, there’s still places at state and local levels where you have Black officeholders, where you have Black voting, especially in majority Black areas like low country South Carolina….African Americans retain power, they continue. It’s really not until the 1890s, with that complete uptick in racial violence and the systematic legal disenfranchisement green-lighted by a very reactionary Supreme Court—sounds familiar—that Reconstruction is completely undone.
The situation in 1876 is not dissimilar to the here and now. Modern-day Republicans look to 1876 for tips on how to finagle their way back to the White House.
Here’s what was up in 1876, the centennial, and the year of that pivotal election: You’ve got angry, violent racists who are armed to the teeth. You have corrupt state governments run by these asshole conservatives openly thwarting the rule of law to protect their hateful allies. You have a reactionary Supreme Court that would absolutely rule in favor of the authoritarian, if push came to shove. You have a presidential election that could, in a nightmare scenario, wind up in the House. And you’d potentially wind up with the Democrat winning the popular vote but the Republican prevailing in the Electoral College. Which, um, sounds uncomfortably like the landscape in 2024.
I asked Sinha about this. She says:
- Well, hopefully we won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. Hopefully we’ll be able to combat this. And in a way, I write history because history is—it’s not just learning about the past, but it’s also a lesson in citizenship. I think Americans [are inundated] with the amount of disinformation we have coming at us from these right wing, you know, the whole Rupert Murdoch empire and other right wing places and of course bad actors, foreign actors, Putin. I just read an article on the amount of disinformation that Russia is feeding into the American political system. I mean, we really are at a stage where I hope we can combat this.
In 1876, the electoral votes in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina were disputed. Different slates of electors were sent to Washington. Ted Cruz, Sinha says, tried to use that precedent in 2020. She continues:
- But that didn’t happen in Arizona. That didn’t happen in Pennsylvania. It didn’t happen in Michigan….It was quite clear that there was no other electoral slate, as it was during Reconstruction. But [Ted Cruz] tried to use that. And he tried to use the controversy at that time to say that maybe we should now relook at the results….
- During Reconstruction, they actually had proposals to abolish the Electoral College and make the elections of presidents direct elections—as they had done for [state] governors…which in the original Constitution was indirect through the legislature; as they would do with Senators in the Progressive era. Unfortunately, that failed. And I just think we need to strengthen our democratic institutions a little bit because…bad actors could do anything under the cover of convoluted and unclear rules, and pretend as if they’re following the Constitution when they clearly are not. So I hope 2024 will be a complete repudiation of that kind of politics.
- What’s shocking is the Republican Party—the way they have all fallen in line with this anti-democratic and virtually traitorous kind of agenda, where they don’t want to fund the war in Ukraine, where they praise Putin rather than allies. And, you know…somebody said they should stop calling themselves the Republican Party because, you know, the original Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, you know, that’s not what it was, [or] what it is today. And maybe they should just call themselves MAGA or some other nickname because that’s what they are today.
American Empire began in North America after Reconstruction.
When I think of the brief foray of the United States into imperial conquest, what comes to mind is the period after the Spanish-American War, when we acquired Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and when we annexed Hawaii. But American imperialism came into its own in the later decades of the 19th century, when the West was “won.”
Sinha explains:
- First, America is founded on Indian dispossession. You’re going back to the colonial era and European colonization. So people just took that as sort of an inevitable process that would happen in the West too. And there were some important and large Indian nations like the Lakotas, like the Apaches. I mean, they had considerable political power and military power. And the U.S. had to expend a lot in terms of money and men to conquer these areas. And maybe it’s because I was brought up in India with the history of British colonialism, [but] I looked at those wars, and they were colonial wars….the way in which the U.S. Army did not follow Lincoln’s code of warfare, of civilized warfare. The way in which they massacred women and children. I mean, you look at the massacres….you know, it starts even during the Civil War with a lot of these volunteer units, especially coming from California, where they had really committed massive massacres of Native Americans. But I think at this moment, there has been so much written and done on Western history and Native American history that it is virtually historical malpractice not to look at this area while writing a history of this period.
The same army that was protecting African Americans in the South was sent to the West to slaughter Native Americans. Sinha explains:
- The final conquest of the West comes with the downfall of Reconstruction in the South. I mean, literally the same army units that are trying to implement Reconstruction are diverted to these imperial projects in the West. So I think it’s really the fall of Reconstruction that facilitates the conquest of the West. I mean, the U.S. army would have been disbanded if there weren’t these Indian Wars…..
- One political project had to be replaced by another. The emancipatory aims of the nation state had to be replaced by these imperial aims. And the fall of Reconstruction, the rise ofJim Crow in the South, facilitates this. And it’s in the political and intellectual atmosphere of the period. You know, you have either pseudoscience or race—this is a heyday of scientific racism, social Darwinism, the ways in which people viewed the working classes, immigrants, especially Asian, Chinese immigrants, the ways in which they viewed Native Americans and then Filipinos and Cubans—it’s not as if these things were disparate. They were quite similar. And imperialism is one way in which we can understand the history of the conquest of the West, and how it then bleeds out into the Pacific, to actual colonization, with the
- annexation of Hawaii and the colonization of the Philippines.
The book explores the period between the Civil War and World War I, highlighting the importance of Reconstruction in shaping the country. Sinha explains her motivation for writing the book and the significance of the Second American Republic. She also draws parallels between Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump, emphasizing the consequences of showing mercy to Confederates. Sinha delves into the horrors of the first Ku Klux Klan and the violent opposition to Reconstruction. The conversation explores the end of Reconstruction, the Compromise of 1877, the nadir of American democracy, the conquest of the West, and the legacy of Reconstruction. It also delves into the question of how a society can atone for its national sins. Plus: coup right, with Coup-Vite!
Follow Manisha:
Buy her book:
Prevail is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/greg ...Read More
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CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
Remember Us for Gift Giving and Study Groups
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
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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
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Graphic: An illustration of Abraham Lincoln waving to supporters at a rally. When Abraham Lincoln campaigned in Hartford, Connecticut, in March 1860, he was met by a new uniformed group—the Wide Awakes. Illustration by Tim O’Brien
History Lesson of the Week: The Club of Cape-Wearing Activists Who Helped Elect Lincoln—and Spark the Civil War
The untold story of the Wide Awakes, the young Americans who took up the torch for their antislavery cause and stirred the nation
By Jon Grinspan
The Smithsonian
The most consequential political organization in American history didn’t get its start in a party headquarters or a smoke-filled room. It began when a few working-class kids designed a costume, which grew into a movement and ultimately an army. And it ended with a civil war. In between, the story of the Wide Awakes of 1860 helps explain how politics can evolve, step by step, into violence.
Edgar S. Yergason is not who you imagine when you consider who started the Civil War. Not a president, or a general, or an enslaver, Eddie Yergason was a gawky 19-year-old textile clerk. But using his skills as a designer—and as a thief—he became the accidental founder of what the New York Tribune would call “the most imposing, influential and potent political organization” in American history.
Yergason was living in Hartford, Connecticut, on February 25, 1860, at the start of the state’s spring gubernatorial race. It all seemed fairly ordinary: Local Republicans were running a well-known incumbent candidate, had a famous speaker in town to give a campaign speech, and were planning a torchlit parade afterward. But 1860 was no ordinary year. National tensions over slavery were already boiling over when, a few months earlier, John Brown launched a raid on Harpers Ferry, hoping to spark a slave uprising. It ended with his body swinging from a Virginia gallows—pushing Americans further into their political corners. Many expected an ugly year culminating in a chaotic and potentially violent presidential election in November. ...Read More
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Bridging the Divide: Gender in Transition
Mexico Solidarity Project News
from April 3, 2024
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Transplant, transport, translate — the list goes on. We use “trans” to mean crossing a boundary, moving something to a different place, connecting where there was no connection before.
Transgender people, those who are not of the sex assigned to them at birth, fit the general definition of a fluid action that benefits the sides being connected. We can save a person’s life with transfused blood or a transplanted kidney without hurting the donor. We can produce food in one place and carry it to another place where that food is needed. We can put the words of one language into the words of another to foster understanding.
The gender binary was never universal. For example, Indigenous people of North America called nonbinary people “two-spirits,” recognizing that far from being defective, they had twice the power of men or women. Under capitalism, the binary became important and enforced: men performed the labor that produced wealth, women produced more laborers to replenish the supply. It’s past time to do away with those gender assignments, and it’s a revolutionary task.
As nonbinary activist Edwing Roldán tells us, transcending the gender barrier today is dangerous and can generate conflict even among those in the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements. But taking actions that disrupt the way things are, even when those actions are beneficial, always takes experimentation and risk before we get it right. How many ships went down looking for transatlantic passages?
What is clear is that nonbinary people are transforming our societies, and our relationships with one another. As Edwing says, “Trans rights are popular rights too!” ...Read More
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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
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Our Amazing Resource for Radical Education
From the settlers to the present, and how its consciousness is conflicted. Prepared by Carl Davidson and Rebecca Tarlau,
with some help from the DSA Rust Belt group.
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There are hundreds of video courses here, along with study guides, downloadable books and links to hundreds of other resources for study groups or individuals.
Nearly 10,000 people have signed on to the OUL for daily 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.
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Video for Learning: Robin Blackburn on the History of Slavery and Capitalism in the Americas...45 min
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Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical' |
This week's topic:
THE LEGACY OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING: a powerpoint
Click the picture to access the blog.
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Tune of the Week: Ibibio Sound Machine - 'Mama Say' ...4.5 min
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Book Review: Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa
By Bob Newland
Liberation
March 24, 2024 - I have been a campaigner for colonial freedom throughout my life. It is to my shame that until reviewing this book, my knowledge of Thomas Sankara was virtually nil.
This is partly explained by the dearth of reporting in anglophone media of events in francophone Africa. It may also be influenced by the change of focus following the success of the majority of African states in throwing off the yolk of colonialism. This book helps to overcome that ignorance and illustrates the impact of cold-war politics on Africa as a whole.
Thomas Sankara came from lowly beginnings but through a youthful decision to join the military gained a high quality education. A Catholic, he became fascinated by liberation theology but in military academy was exposed to Marxism through his engagement with communists organised in the African Independence Party (PAI).
PAI leader Adama Toure was one of his greatest influences. Under his tutelage Sankara learned of the Vietnamese victory over French colonialism coming to side with the guerillas against their colonial masters. He also learned about the French and Russian revolutions.
While promoting Marxism-Leninism, Sankara never described himself as a communist despite his close association with the communist groupings with which he spent many hours in discussion. His main influences were Nkrumah, Lumumba, Machel and Fanon. He was a great fan of Che Guevara becoming known as the African Che. He was particularly impressed by Cabral’s Marxist methodology and his development of a theory of ‘Third-Worldism’ as opposed to more orthodox European Marxism.
Sankara came to power in a junior officers coup in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) on 4 August 1983. This removed a previous highly corrupt military regime which was very close to France, the former colonial power. He was committed to empowering the people and overcoming corruption which he saw as the way in which France maintained its power over its former colony and the central barrier to betterment for the people.
Rejecting a top down structure Sankara sought to develop local democracy through Cuban inspired Committees for the Defence of the Revolution. Nationally matters were controlled by the National Council for the Revolution (CNR). This composed military officers along with civilian groupings including the communist OCV and communist led PAI-LIPAD. The trade unions were also represented.
Sadly the CNR was riven with competing ambitions. Eventually the military forced Sankara to expel the communists. Without a political party to discuss, debate and formulate policy his initiatives became more haphazard and over time he succeeded in alienating those on whom his power depended. Military leaders became dissatisfied with the lowly lives the revolution imposed on them and began developing corrupt relationships with neighbouring hostile states, particularly Cote d’Ivoire. Following a teachers strike led by reactionaries opposed to the revolution the trade union was banned and its leaders imprisoned. Over time, the ordinary peasants became fed up with the constant demand upon them to be revolutionaries pressed by the day to day need to survive and keep their families.
Sankara’s revolution also fell foul of cold-war contradictions. France manoeuvred with military officers in the CNR and former coup leaders expelled following the 1983 coup. The US deeply mistrusted the communist influence and Sankara’s outspoken opposition to colonialism and imperialism. Sadly the USSR was luke-warm in its support as Sankara sought to follow a distinctly African model of socialism and fought hard to keep Burkina Faso in the non-aligned movement.
In 1987 matters came to a head when Sankara threatened to act against corruption amongst military leaders. While there is evidence to suggest that France had a powerful hand behind the coup and promised immediate recognition of the coup leaders the assassination of Sankara does not appear to have been part of that plan. The leader of the coup was Blaise Compaore, one of Sankara’s closest allies in the launch of the revolution. Following the 1989 coup Compaoré served as President for 27 years until being overthrown in 2014 by a popular uprising supported by junior military officers. Democratic elections took place in 2015. Sankara’s reputation has subsequently been resurrected in support of widespread social and economic change but without the revolutionary fervour with which he ruled Burkina Faso. Since the book was written Compaoré was finally arrested, extradited and convicted of the murder of Sankara. He is now serving a life sentence.
It is impossible to say what may have happened if Thomas Sankara had not been assassinated. The evidence suggests that even had he lived, the forces that subsequent to his death overturned the major economic, social and political advances of his ‘revolution’ had already established sufficient control of events to achieve their aims despite him.
His legacy however demonstrates that he was a man of the people, a leader in many ways ahead of his time. He addressed questions of the environment and environmental justice when much of the world was in denial. He was forthright in his opposition to debt repayment with a commitment to regional collaboration alongside national self-reliance. His advocacy of women’s rights and equality in the most difficult of circumstances should shame many leaders in Africa and globally even today.
One unintended benefit of this fascinating volume is that it casts light on issues which again become pertinent as a result of recent military coups in the Sahel region including that in Niger. While these may have occurred with popular support, as was the case in Burkina Faso (Upper Volta) in 1983, without the development and legalisation of political parties and freedom for trade unions then military leaders will always tend to military solutions to political problems. This insight and the detailed telling of Sankara’s life makes this book a fascinating and educating book which I highly recommend.
Bob Newland is a Liberation member and a London Recruit ...Read More
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Film Review: The Origin of Evil — French Thriller With Serpentine Twists
Laure Calamy stars in a thoroughly entertaining story of wealth and class
By Jonathan Romne
Financial Times
MARCH 28 2024 - The world fell for Laure Calamy when she played the permanently frazzled PA Noémie in French series Call My Agent!. Since then, she has become a major fixture in French cinema, notably in the bracingly intense working-life drama Full Time. There are traces of Noémie’s wide-eyed gawkiness in Calamy’s role in Sébastien Marnier’s The Origin of Evil, but her character here inhabits a very different world. She plays a woman employed in a fish-packing plant while her lover (Suzanne Clément) serves a prison sentence. One day, she finally does something she has been contemplating nervously: she travels to the Côte d’Azur and announces to well-heeled restaurateur Serge Dumontet (Jacques Weber) that she is his illegitimate daughter.
Serge welcomes her cordially while the other Dumontets are contemptuously high-handed. Soon, though, she finds the family opening their mansion doors with lofty graciousness — only for her to realise that everyone has different motives for welcoming her.
So, an outsider settles into the household of a wealthy, neurotic clan and causes ripples . . . Without revealing too much, this has more than whiff of the much-discussed Saltburn, although Marnier’s film premiered a whole year before Emerald Fennell’s. In fact, The Origin of Evil is considerably subtler, not to say more coherent, even if it too has an erotically charged bath scene.
More than anything, Marnier’s film recalls the psychological thrillers once made by the French New Wave’s number one Hitchcockian, Claude Chabrol, with comparable acidic humour. In particular, Calamy has a wonderful moment when Serge gives his long-lost daughter a too-fond, too-menacing cuddle, and her smile turns to horror as she hears the vitriol he is spouting. Throughout, Calamy’s face is worth watching closely, as her expressions do not always mean what they appear to.
The casting yields razor-sharp character sketches from Weber, a revered grandee of stage and screen, as a dethroned king rather harder to sympathise with than Lear. Dominique Blanc plays his wife Louise, an obsessive collector of pricey junk, with a positively regal line in casually poisonous put-downs. Doria Tillier exudes chic, chilly haughtiness as their executive daughter.
The twists are elegantly serpentine: just when you think you have spotted one coming, the next slithers right past you. It all goes a little haywire towards the end, but overall this is a relishably sour amuse-bouche and one of the most entertaining offerings from French cinema in ages. ...Read More
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