Portside

Re: Mitch McConnell Warns That Voting Bill Would Bring U.S. to the Brink of Democracy (Eleanor Roosevelt)
I Want My Lawyer  --  cartoon
Re: Yes, We Should Still Defund the Police (Kirsten Barquist)
Re: What Really Happened on Juneteenth — And Why It’s Time for Supremacists and Their Sympathizers to Surrender (Sue Jackson; Terry Sanders)
New Toy to Chew On  --  cartoon by Mike Luckovich
Lidice - July 2, 1942 - Remembering Nazi Genocide
Re: The New York City Unions Whose Backdoor Deal Sold Out Retirees, Helped Insurance Industry (John Magisano; Jay Schaffner)
Re: Before Stonewall: Queer Liberation’s Communist Party Roots (Naomi; Allen Young; Michael Funke)
Critical Race Theory Boogeyman  --  cartoon by Mike Thompson
Critical Race Theory  --  cartoon by Mike Stanfill
Re: The Roots of Today's White Collar Union Wave Are Deeper Than You Think (Marilyn Albert)

Resources:

Anti-Racist Resources (Teaching for Change)
Queers Demand A World Without Prisons — Poster of the Week (Center for the Study of Political Graphics)

Announcements:

Michael Klare on the new Cold War with China - Can we keep it from getting hot? - July 7 (Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club)

 

Re: Mitch McConnell Warns That Voting Bill Would Bring U.S. to the Brink of Democracy
 

This "republic not democracy" trope has been a keynote of American fascists and fascist groups since the 1930s. What's next, Mitch, a brown shirt?

Eleanor Roosevelt
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

I Want My Lawyer  --  cartoon
 

Re: Yes, We Should Still Defund the Police
 

Much as I agree with the sentiment and goals of this sentiment, IMO it is still about the worst messaging/marketing slogan ever. It basically hands a plate of red meat to the fear-mongering right wing.

How about a positive message that points to both a cause and a solution: "Re-fund social services"

Kirsten Barquist

Re: What Really Happened on Juneteenth — And Why It’s Time for Supremacists and Their Sympathizers to Surrender
 

Just Tell the Darn Truth!

“It’s not that Gen. Granger was giving information to the enslaved people. He was giving it to the masters” — at the barrel of a gun.

That’s the true history of Juneteenth — along with a message that somehow has eluded the South and their white supremacist inheritors today:  You lost the damned war. Surrender already.

Sue Jackson
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

If you’re still saying it, you must have a strong desire to have Republicans take back control of. Congress and the Presidency.

You must have a very strong death wish.

If you really mean “reform” not “defund” why don’t you directly SAY IT!

Terry Sanders
Santa Monica

New Toy to Chew On  --  cartoon by Mike Luckovich
 

Mike Luckovich
June 30, 2021
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Lidice - July 2, 1942 - Remembering Nazi Genocide
 

This is a memorial to the truth that real facts matter:

Over a third of Americans now don’t believe that over 6 million Jews were killed  in the Holocaust, but on 2 July 1942, 82 children from Lidice -- a small village in Czechoslovakia -- were transferred to the Lódz Gestapo office. Those 82 boys and girls were then transported to an extermination camp at Chelmno 34 miles away. They were gassed shortly after their arrival. This remarkable sculpture by Marie Uchytilová commemorates them.—What you ignore you empower.  

Never Again.

Re: The New York City Unions Whose Backdoor Deal Sold Out Retirees, Helped Insurance Industry

(posting on Portside Labor)
 

My lame assed "union" supported this deal, while working members haven't gotten a raise in 6 years.

John Magisano
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

The City has been negotiating with the Municipal Labor Committee to change current health care coverage for retired city workers (from all unions), forcing people onto Medicare Advantage plans.

Medicare Advantage is not a good option. Claims are denied. For many of us, we are not currently in a network, we see whatever doctor we need, with Medicare paying 80%, then our insurance picking up the rest. Under the proposal we would be surrendering our current Medicare coverage for Medicare Advantage, and would never be able to go back to Medicare. Medicare Advantage is a huge step backwards - it is privatized healthcare, nothing near to the goal of single payer.

The municipal unions are sacrificing the contractual coverage of retired workers for current workers. This sends a terrible message as to how unions will treat and look out for current workers when they retire. This is no way for unions, or for the city, to say they are on the side of working people.

Simultaneous with this privatization plan, the City's public sector unions have opposed the New York Health Act under the misguided belief that enactment will take away negotiated medical benefits from current members. Ironically, this privatization scheme undermines the very negotiated benefits the unions claim to be protecting.

There is no question that this would save the city a lot of money. But those of us who are retirees have already given the city enormous savings over the years. Whatever we were paid in salary, working conditions and benefits, included taking into account retiree healthcare. To now cut these benefits is to take away from us what we already accepted as prior reduced working conditions and salary, so that these benefits would be included. We feel betrayed, that the city, and our unions, consider us disposable.

So where will the funds come from for this, and for other needs of the people of New York City? How about a stock transfer tax.

This issue is urgent. The city and unions have been conducting secret negotiations. The plan was to usher in a new plan on July 1. We don't know if this is still true.

Jay Schaffner

Re: Before Stonewall: Queer Liberation’s Communist Party Roots
 

I was shocked to see this article on Portside. To me, having lived through the Party in the 1960s and ’70s, it is ludicrous, and self-serving, for the Party to claim "The modern movement for queer liberation—or gay liberation to use the as-yet less inclusive terminology of the 1960s and ’70s—wouldn’t exist without the Communist Party USA"  This is revisionist history, not worthy of any progressive organization.  In 1979, the Party and the Young Workers Liberation League (YWLL) blocked Holly Near from the 11th World Youth Festival in Cuba, under the ridiculous notion that having a gay or lesbian cultural performer would be an insult to the Cuban people and give a false representation as to the makeup of U.S. youth.

Going back to the 1930s, including the 1960s and 70s, the Party asked homosexual members to drop out, feeling that the working class would not understand an organization that had gays in their membership. During the McCarthy period this became actual policy, under the notion that the government would be easily able to turn gay members into informants since homosexuality was outlawed. In a number of areas, gay and lesbian members were expelled.

There is no way that the Party participated in the Gay Liberation movement. What is needed is an apology.

Naomi

      =====

I am a gay man with experience as a New Left and gay liberation activist, also a red diaper baby, age 79. That People's World article you published is yet another bullshit article on our history, this one  suggesting the Communist Party promoted gay liberation. The article focuses solely on Harry Hay, who was indeed a Communist, but left the party and moved on politically with great energy via gay liberation and eventually founded the Radical Faeries with many new & interesting ideas.  He certainly discontinued pushing old Marxist screed. The CPUSA was staunchly anti-gay and expelled gay and lesbian members over many decades.  Its position caused great anguish and pain for party members as well as other leftist lesbians and gay men. Yet they dare, in this article, to suggest they helped launch our movement. I shudder at the re-writing of history, which is happening all over the place. A friend sent this article to me; I didn't even know the People's World still existed.

Allen Young

      =====

I appreciate C.J. Atkins's historical and theoretical perspective on the role that some CPUSA members played in building organizations in the decades prior to the emergence of a Gay Liberation movement in the early 1970s.

A more complete history would acknowledge that it was not easy to be gay in the CPUSA in the three decades between Stonewall and the Party's 2001 support of LGBTQ equality.

This was especially true in the NY area, and at the Party's national headquarters. I recall hearing anti-gay slurs by young comrades there in the late 1970s. Being gay was deemed to be a sign of bourgeois decadence by many of them.

Things were better in northern California, but even there the handful of gay Communists I knew or knew of felt the need to be at least partially in the closet. This was especially true for Party leaders.

This was long after gay liberation and lesbian activism, including the new women's music movement, were established and accepted in many left circles.

A thorough history of the CP in relationship to the LGBTQ movement should recognize this part of Party history as well.

Michael Funke

Critical Race Theory Boogeyman  --  cartoon by Mike Thompson
 

Mike Thompson
June 27, 2021
USA Today

Critical Race Theory  --  cartoon by Mike Stanfill
 

Mike Stanfill
June 26, 2021
Raging Pencils

Re: The Roots of Today's White Collar Union Wave Are Deeper Than You Think
 

The article on the roots of UAW Local 2110 was very good, but a bit wrong on one point. The original organizing of the Museum of Modern Art, Village Voice, and several other white collar "shops" was done, not in the 1980s, but the 1970s, by the union District 65 before it affiliated with the UAW and with one union organizer in the early days - my mother, the late Margie Albert. My mother died in 1981 but left behind her a group of working class, feminist women organizers who continued to build the union into what became Local 2110.

Marilyn Albert,
Richmond, California

Anti-Racist Resources (Teaching for Change)
 

Demand for our social justice, anti-racist resources increased dramatically last year and has remained steady throughout the school year. We saw exponential growth in the number of families and teachers accessing our materials as they made the shift to online learning, and again after the uprisings against racial injustice.

In the last few months, we:

• Added new lessons and articles to CivilRightsTeaching.org in preparation for the new edition of our book, Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching, for teaching about the role of everyday people in the Civil Rights Movement

• Held our annual teach-in with Howard University and added more lessons and stories about teaching during the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action and Year of Purpose

• Through our Zinn Education Project (coordinated with Rethinking Schools), organized a #TeachTruth Day of Action to challenge GOP legislation in at least 21 states that would require teachers to lie to students about the role of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and oppression throughout U.S. history

• Expanded opportunities for our D.C. area teacher working groups to meet and collaborate virtually

• Promoted our Zinn Education Project campaigns to teach about Reconstruction, the struggle for voting rights, climate justice, and the Black freedom struggle

Thank you for your support of social justice, anti-racist teaching.

Support Teaching for Change

Teaching for Change
PO Box 73038
Washington, DC 20056

Queers Demand A World Without Prisons — Poster of the Week (Center for the Study of Political Graphics)

Poster text:

"Queers Demand A World Without Prisons We reject hate crimes legislation, "gender-responsive" prisons, and all other measures that use gay rights rhetoric to expand the systems that murder and imprison us. We stand against a prison industrial complex that targets people of color, immigrants, queer and trans people, sex workers, and poor people. We believe in queer imagination and transformative justice to build a new world based on liberation and interdependence."

This poster is featured in our upcoming digital exhibition “Queer Rights Are Human Rights: Posters of LGBTQ+ Struggles & Celebrations” premiering next Wednesday, June 30. For more details about our three-part virtual event, click here. 

Center for the Study of Political Graphics
3916 Sepulveda Blvd, Suite 103
Culver City, CA 90230

Michael Klare on the new Cold War with China - Can we keep it from getting hot? - July 7 - (Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club)
 

Join us on Thursday, July 7, at 5 pm for a special Wellstone meeting via Zoom, featuring a talk by Professor Michael Klare. The United States and the People’s Republic of China are engaged in what can only be described as a new kind of Cold War. Both countries are rapidly expanding their military capacity to engage in war and engage in dangerously provocative maneuvers in the South China Sea and the waters around Taiwan. The U.S. and China are interlocked in diplomatic efforts to isolate the other and restrict access to the other to international markets. These policies could easily result in an incident likely to trigger a massive war, like the mutual antagonisms among the imperial powers of Europe resulting in the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars. Michael Klare will discuss the causes and characteristics of the new Cold War, the risks of its triggering a hot war, and strategies for preventing this from occurring. Michael Klare is a professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C., where he studies the impact of emerging technologies on the future of war and arms control.  He is the Defense Correspondent of The Nation magazine and the author of fifteen books, including, most recently, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. This event is co-sponsored by the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club and the Committee for a SANE U.S. China Policy. You are invited to a Zoom meeting. When: Jul 7, 2021 05:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada) Register in advance for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0qceGvqzMrGdBHWFEV6dqJlr5xJy9DXhQQ After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. In solidarity, The Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club Peace Committee