September 7, 2015

The Forgotten Radical History Of Labor Day

By Ben Railton ~ September 7, 2015

It’s become commonplace to complain about how the true meanings of our American holidays have been forgotten in favor of weekend sales, cookouts and family gatherings. But the problem is particularly clear when it comes to Labor Day. While holidays like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July still feature prominent collective and media reminders of their historical and cultural significance alongside the barbeques and beach trips, Labor Day has become almost entirely divorced from its origins and associated instead with one last burst of summer fun before the fall and new school year commence in earnest.

In an era when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has made his name by attacking and destroying labor unions in his state, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has recently argued that the national teachers union deserves “a punch in the face,” remembering Labor Day’s true origins feels more important than ever. Even if we leave these partisan voices aside, our current moment represents the culmination of decades of rising anti-union sentiment among many Americans, a trend that has not coincidentally occurred alongside plummeting numbers in union membership.

The question of who is responsible for the creation of a holiday devoted to labor remains in some dispute. For many years it was attributed to Peter McGuire, a carpenter who became a national labor leader in the 1880s; recently historians have argued instead for Matthew Maguire, a machinist and leader of the New York Central Labor Union (CLU) ...

More here: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/radical-origins-of-labor-day

September 4, 2015

The best Kim Davis Memes this week ~

September 3, 2015

Demonizing the Poor

by Sanford Schram & Joe Soss
9-3-15

In April, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed into law a new set of welfare rules titled, with an Orwellian flourish, the HOPE Act. The measure, Brownback stated, “provides an opportunity for success. It’s about the dignity of work and helping families move from reliance on a government pittance to becoming self-sufficient by developing the skills to find a well-paying job and build a career.”

Yet as critics were quick to point out, the new law was clearly more about limiting poor people’s decisions than about building their careers. The HOPE Act prohibits Kansas welfare recipients from withdrawing more than $25 in benefits per day and makes it illegal to spend public aid on jewelry, tattoos, massages, spa treatments, lingerie, tobacco, movies, bail bonds, arcade games, visits to swimming pools, fortunetellers, amusement parks, or ocean cruises.

Not to be outdone by their neighbor, Missouri’s legislators were soon debating whether to prohibit the use of foods stamps (officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) for lobster as well as cookies, chips, energy drinks, and steak.

Federal rules may make it hard to put such restrictions into practice, as Florida officials have discovered after repeatedly mandating an invasive drug-testing regime for welfare recipients, but the feds can hardly be counted on for opposition. Last year Congress expanded its long list of welfare restrictions, prohibiting the withdrawal of cash welfare benefits at casinos, liquor stores, or strip clubs. As of April, twenty-three states had imposed additional limits on the use of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards, and eighteen other states were considering the same ...

More here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/welfare-republicans-sam-brownback-race-corporations/

September 1, 2015

The Global Race to the Bottom

by Lucia Pradella ~ 9/1/15

Unemployment has reached unprecedented heights in Western Europe, wages are declining, and attacks on organized labor are intensifying. Nearly a quarter of Western Europe’s population, about 92 million people, was at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2013. That’s nearly 8.5 million more people than before the crisis.

The poverty, material deprivation, and super-exploitation traditionally associated with the Global South are reemerging in the rich parts of Europe.

The crisis is undermining the “European social model,” and its assumption that employment protects individuals from poverty. The number of working poor — employed workers in households with an annual income below the poverty threshold — is growing, and austerity is going to make things much worse in the future.

Critics of austerity argue that it is absurd and counterproductive, but European leaders disagree. During the latest round of negotiations with Greece, German Chancellor Angela Merkel argued, “This is not about several billion euros — this is fundamentally about how the EU can stay competitive in the world.” ...

More here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/merkel-austerity-globalization-eu-poverty/

August 30, 2015

Gendering Radicalism

by: Tony Pecinovsky
August 28 2015

The history of American communism, while contested, is a central component of 20th-century U.S. history. Arguably, we cannot write about 20th-century U.S. history without writing about the Communist Party. Similarly, we cannot write about 20th-century California without writing about the California Communist Party - or the three generations of women leaders who led the California CP from its birth until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Beth Slutsky's new book Gendering Radicalism: Women and Communism in Twentieth-Century California does just that. By focusing on the lives of three remarkable women communists, their trials and tribulations, the victories and defeats, Slutsky places their lives squarely within the context of the times. She not only tells their story. She tells the party's story - as well as the story of the broader movements for social and economic justice, of which the party was a key component.

Slutsky first focuses on Charlotte Anita Whitney (1867-1955), a well-to-do suffragist, women's rights advocate, socialist and - eventually - founding member of the Communist Party USA ...

More here: http://peoplesworld.org/gendering-radicalism-tells-important-story-of-women-and-communism/

August 29, 2015

How the Free Market Killed New Orleans by M. Parenti

Michael Parenti posted on Facebook with the comment that it could be shared. Because it is the best thing I've seen written on Hurricane Katrina I am doing so. Thanks to Starry Messenger because I viewed it first through her facebook page -

Michael Parenti
21 hrs ·

It is ten years since Hurricane Katrina pounced upon New Orleans. Below is an article I wrote soon after---reprinted in CONTRARY NOTIONS: THE MICHAEL PARENTI READER---and reproduced here to counter the blather offered by the media over the last few days:

HOW THE FREE MARKET KILLED NEW ORLEANS by Michael Parenti

The free market played a crucial role in the 2005 destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Forewarned that a momentous category 5 hurricane might hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market. They announced that everyone should evacuate. All were expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own private interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. Thus does Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” work its wonders in mysterious ways.

In New Orleans there would be none of the regimented collectivist evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When a powerful category 5 hurricane hit that island in 2004, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist Party cadres, evacuated some 1.5 million people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population. The Cubans lost 20,000 homes to that hurricane---but not a single person was killed, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.

On Day One of Hurricane Katrina, 29 August 2005, it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans had perished in New Orleans. Many people had “refused” to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain “stubborn.”

It was not until Day Three that well-paid telecasters began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With hardly any cash at hand, and over 100,000 people without cars of their own, many had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not work so well for them.

Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with fewer numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had jobs before the flood hit them. That’s what most poor people do in this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs, sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because they’re lazy but because they are paid poverty wages while burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.

The free market played a role in other ways. President G.W. Bush’s agenda was to cut government services to the bone and make people rely on the private sector for the things they might need. He cut $30 million in flood control appropriations. He sliced an additional $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of pumping out water had to be shelved.

Personnel with the Army Corps of Engineers had started building new levees several years before Hurricane Katrina, but many of them were taken off such projects and sent to Iraq, where they were needed to assist the empire in its wars.

It was not actually the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans. Katrina swerved and hit parts of Mississippi much harder. For New Orleans most of the destruction was caused by the flood that came when the levees broke, a flood that had long been feared by many.

On Day Three Bush took to the airwaves, and said in a live TV interview, “I don’t think anyone anticipated that breach of the levees.” Just another untruth tumbling from his lips. The catastrophic flooding of New Orleans had been foreseen by storm experts, engineers, Louisiana journalists, state officials, and even some federal agencies. All sorts of people had been predicting disaster for years, pointing to the danger of rising water levels and the need to strengthen the levees and pumps, and fortify the entire coastland. Bush chose not to listen.

In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite reactionaries allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market was expected to take care of things. By pursuing their own private profit, the developers would supposedly devise outcomes that would benefit us all. But the Louisiana wetlands serve as a natural absorbent and barrier between New Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some years now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the Gulf‘ coast. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the White House.

This brings us to another way that the free market helped destroy New Orleans. By relying almost entirely on fossil fuel as an energy source—far more expensive and therefore more profitable than solar, tidal, or wind power---the free market has been a great contributor to global warming. Global warming, in turn, has caused a drastic rise in sea levels. And rising sea levels have been destroying the protective fringe of barrier islands and coastal marshlands along the Louisiana coast. “Every year,” reported the New York Times “another 25 square miles, an area roughly the size of Manhattan, sinks quietly beneath the waves. In some places, the [Louisiana] coastline has receded 15 miles from where it was in the 1920s.”

Global warming also adds to the ferocity of storms. The warmer waters and warmer air create greater evaporation and allow for greater accumulation as the hurricane passes over the waters gathering strength and momentum. So Katrina went from a category 3 to a category 5 as it came across the Caribbean and into the Gulf of Mexico. A year after Katrina the Bush administration blocked the release of a revealing report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report suggests that global warming is contributing to the increasing strength and frequency of hurricanes. We can guess why the White House would want to suppress that kind of information.

As for the widely criticized rescue operation, free-marketeers like to say that relief to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private effort. It was a favorite preachment of President Ronald Reagan that private charity can do the job. For many crucial days that indeed seemed to be the policy with the flooding of New Orleans. The federal government was nowhere in sight but the Salvation Army began to muster its troops, as did many other organizations. Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network---taking a moment off from God’s work of pushing the nomination of conservative jurist John Roberts to the Supreme Court---called for donations and announced “Operation Blessing” which consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment of canned goods and Holy Bibles to the hurricane victims.

The Red Cross went into action, in its own peculiar way. Its message: “Don’t send food or blankets; send money.” Apparently the Red Cross preferred to buy its own blankets and food. It received over $800 million in three weeks after the catastrophe but had failed to distribute most of it. A caravan of doctors and nurses from Ohio, laden with medical supplies for about seven thousand people, reached the Coliseum in New Orleans only to be told by the Red Cross that they were not needed. They were turned away even though the medical personnel within the Coliseum kept asking for help.

By Day Three even the usually myopic media began to realize the immense failure of the rescue operation. People were dying because relief had not arrived. Especially victimized were the infants, the elderly, the infirm, and others needing special medical attention. The authorities seemed more concerned with the looting than with rescuing people, more concerned with “crowd control,” which consisted of forcing thousands to stay pent up in barren areas devoid of minimal amenities or proper shelter. The police, state troopers, National Guardsmen, and U.S. Army personnel spent more time patrolling and pointing their guns at people than rescuing or otherwise helping them.

Questions arose that the free market seemed incapable of answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so few helicopters and just a small force of Coast Guard crews? Why did it take helicopters five hours to lift six people out of one hospital? When would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were the feds? Where were the buses and trucks? the shelters and portable toilets? The medical supplies and water? How was it that newscasters could get in and out of flood areas but rescuers and supplies could not?

And where was Homeland Security? What had Homeland Security done with the $33.8 billions allocated to it for fiscal 2005? By Day Four, almost all the major media were reporting that the federal government’s response was “a national disgrace.” Meanwhile George Bush finally made his photo-op shirtsleeve appearance in a few well-chosen disaster areas before romping off to play golf.

By the end of the first week, as if to demonstrate that reality is irrelevant, various free-market bloggers were already claiming ideological victory. They argued that the failure to deal with the crisis is proof that “government is inept; it doesn’t work.” It was private individuals, charities, and corporations that pitched in to help. It was Wal-Mart that sent in three trailer trucks loaded with water, and it was the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), part of Homeland Security, that turned them away. It was private families that took the refugees into their homes, while government herded them into the Superdome.

Overlooked here is that the great outpouring of aid from private citizens, as heartening as it was, did nothing to address the problems of flood and storm, evacuation, public safety, community security, long term individual care, rehabilitation, and infrastructure reconstruction.

To be sure, government does not work--certainly not when it is in the hands of reactionaries who have no desire to see it work. New Orleans was victimized by those rightwing ideologues who oppose the idea that government can be a salutary force in regard to social needs and human services. The White House reactionaries would be quite content to demonstrate that government is not to be counted on when it comes to helping communities (especially low-income and ethnic minority communities that are Democratic strongholds). Thus Washington took four days to respond to requests that National Guard units from other states be allowed into Louisiana.

For all their inertia, FEMA officials played a chillingly active role in sabotaging the delivery of aid, turning away supply convoys, and warehousing or giving the runaround to the many volunteer rescue units that poured in from other states. The community organizations, churches, and other grassroots groups that took in and fed thousands of people received not a dollar of reimbursement, neither from the Red Cross nor FEMA.

Of course, it should not go unnoticed that the White House reactionaries are selective free marketeers. They want to dismantle human services, get rid of public schools, public housing, and public health facilities; and they want to abolish the government’s regulatory role in the corporate economy. But they also want to extend government power into other areas. They want more power to carry out surveillance, classify official information, control private morals, vaporize civil liberties, and suppress public protest. They want plenty of government involvement when it comes to massive public subsidies and contracts for corporate America, limitless expansion of armaments and military technology, and perpetual overseas intervention. It is the victory of empire over republic. Government is not there to serve the people. The people are there to serve government.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in a moment of touching irony, foreign aid was tendered by almost fifty countries, including many poorer ones such as the Dominican Republic, Honduras, India, Pakistan, Russia, and Thailand. By Day Seven, Mexico had sent army convoys and a navy ship laden with food, supplies, and specialists. German cargo planes came in with ready-to-eat meals and a German officer who openly expressed his concern that the meals might not reach the people in need. (He must have been watching the news.)

Cuba--which has a record of sending doctors to dozens of countries, including a thankful Sri Lanka during the tsunami disaster---offered almost 1600 doctors and loads of medical supplies. Meanwhile Venezuela offered one million barrels of gasoline, $5 million in cash, water purification plants, and 50 tons of canned foods and water.

Predictably, the offers from Cuba and Venezuela were rejected by the U.S. State Department. And as of Day Ten, the Bush administration had nothing to say about the vast array of supplies offered by all the other countries. People throughout the world, having seen all the television images, were beginning to think that perhaps America really was not paradise on earth. Eventually a few grudging thanks were heard from the White House. But what a deflating and insulting role reversal that America was taking aid from the likes of Mexico or anyone else. America the Beautiful and Powerful, America the Supreme Rescuer and World Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity most certainly would not accept foreign aid from a Third-World communist “failure” such as Cuba. But eventually aid sent by capitalist Honduras, capitalist Thailand and other capitalist nations was allowed in.

Postscript. To confirm the worst that has been said above, let us note that a year after the Katrina disaster, very little assistance was reaching the displaced working poor of New Orleans, most of whom were renters. An estimated 60 to 80 percent of rental units in the city were either destroyed or heavily damaged. Most of these had been occupied by low- and middle-income families. Billions in housing aid was pouring in but the bulk of it was slated for homeowners. Rents skyrocketed an average of almost 40 percent across the city in the year after Hurricane Katrina. Many lower-income residents were priced out of the market. The longer that rental properties rotted in the Louisiana heat and humidity, the more difficult they were to restore. In some areas homeowners were attempting to use the recovery process to rid their neighborhoods of long-standing apartment buildings that were damaged during the storm. “The renters of New Orleans, it seems, are on their own.”

A native of New Orleans, Jill Pletcher, wrote to me: “The conditions here--the city itself--is in shambles. Rats and trash in all the ‘off-touristy’ places, which is most of New Orleans. It's not the New Orleans I grew-up in. The dirty brown lines 18 feet high on the sides of familiar buildings where water sat for two weeks is a sickening sight and reminder of a national atrocity---and one that people now smirk at while they express their ‘Katrina fatigue.’”

What the Katrina disaster demonstrated so clearly was that the White House reactionaries had neither the desire nor the decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in dire straits. In the aftermath of the hurricane, I heard someone complain, “Bush is trying to save the world when he can’t even take care of his own people here at home.” Not quite true. He certainly does take very good care of his own people, that tiny fraction of one percent, the superrich. It’s just that the working people of New Orleans are not part of his crowd.

~The End~

August 20, 2015

Tearing Down the Walls

Tearing Down the Walls

The story of the Stonewall Rebellion and the rise of the gay liberation movement.
by Keegan O'Brien 8-20-15

Forty-six years ago patrons at the Stonewall Inn, a popular New York City gay bar, fought back against abusive police, and in doing so launched the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement.

With the historic Supreme Court ruling in June declaring gay marriage the law of the land in all fifty states, it’s undeniable that we’ve come a long way from a time when cops routinely raided gay bars, and being outed virtually guaranteed a person would be labeled a sexual psychopath, blacklisted, and legally barred from employment in most occupations. It’s no exaggeration that many of the freedoms experienced by queer people today would have been inconceivable just a generation or two ago.

However, LGBTQ people still face oppression: a lack of protection in employment and housing, youth homelessness, bullying and high suicide rates, violence against trans women (disproportionally trans women of color), incarceration, police brutality, and poverty. Mainstream LGBTQ organizations (what some radicals refer to as Gay Inc.) are tied to corporate America and prefer to cozy up to the political establishment rather than confront it ...

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/lgbtq-stonewall-marriage-equality-mattachine-sylvia-rivera/

August 20, 2015

Bernie and Marijuana Legalization

One of the key issues in this election will be marijuana legalization — and Bernie Sanders is getting the attention of those who say it’s time. He’s addressed the U.S. “war on drugs” a few times already, and it looks as though groups fighting for the right to toke are beginning to move in his support. Added to other key support Sanders has received, this may be a deciding factor in this election.

Bernie Sanders’ official policy on drugs, as expressed on his campaign site, is that the war on drugs is the new prohibition, and like the previous one, it has failed. He cites votes for medical legalization, and against military force in preventing drug trafficking.

He calls the current laws ineffective and a means to imprison nonviolent offenders, and for addiction, he proposes access to treatment, rather than punishment. Aside from medical use, Sanders has a cautious approach on marijuana: he says he’d want to observe how things go in states that have legalized recreational use like Colorado, and move forward accordingly — in due time.

Sanders has spoken publicly about his longstanding feeling that marijuana is a low priority — according to the Denver Post, he has said that police “[have] more important things to do” than making arrests for drug use ...

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/2350989/marijuana-legalization-advocates-throw-support-behind-bernie-sanders/#iS9YmMFPPqjlo5CW.99

August 19, 2015

Bernie channeling FDR today -

Only 28 minutes in, thousands of likes and shares ...

Bernie Sanders
28 mins ·

Let me tell my Republican colleagues that I respectfully disagree with their approach. Instead of cutting Social Security, we need to expand Social Security benefits. Instead of cutting head start and childcare, we need to move to a universal pre-k system for all the children of this country. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminded us: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.” And that is a test that we as a nation must once again meet and master.
8.7k Likes 174 Comments 1.5k Shares

August 17, 2015

Racial Wealth Gap Persists Despite Degree, Study Says

By PATRICIA COHEN
AUG. 16, 2015

Even with tuition shooting up, the payoff from a college degree remains strong, lifting lifelong earnings and protecting many graduates like a Teflon coating against the worst effects of economic downturns.

But a new study has found that for black and Hispanic college graduates, that shield is severely cracked, failing to protect them from both short-term crises and longstanding challenges.

“The long-term trend is shockingly clear,” said William R. Emmons, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and one of the authors of the report. “White and Asian college grads do much better than their counterparts without college, while college-grad Hispanics and blacks do much worse proportionately.”

A college degree has long been recognized as a great equalizer, a path for minorities to help bridge the economic chasm that separates them from whites. But the report, scheduled to be released on Monday, raises troubling questions about the ability of a college education to narrow the racial and ethnic wealth gap ...

More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/business/racial-wealth-gap-persists-despite-degree-study-says.html