Portside

Free shots on US! Celebrate Vaccinco De Mayo!  --  cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz
Re: Last Night Was Joe Biden’s Moment. May There Be Many More. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
Re: 'We Need to Think Bigger': Jamaal Bowman Delivers Progressive Response to Biden (Frank Stricker; Louis Guida)
Re: May Day 1971 Was a Day Against War (Daniel Millstone)
Re: It Only Takes a Few People to Change Your State’s Congressional Seats (Sandy Grubb)
Re: Where the Federal Government’s Charter School Program Went Wrong (Cliff Gulliver)
Whatever He Says  --  cartoon by Mike Luckovich
Re: The White Republic and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Ethan Young; Bob Zellner)
Re: Heroes But Not Saints: Why We Shouldn't 'Cancel' Flawed Progressive Icons (Jose Luis Medina; Sarah Woodhead; Alex Melody Torres; Judith Mahoney Pasternak; Marta Schmidt; Arlene Halfon)
Re: Gabriel García Márquez and Magical Internationalism (Mike Liston)

The Science Gods  --  cartoon by  Mike Stanfill
APALA Calls on the Biden Administration to Immediately Impose Sanctions Against the Military Junta of Myanmar (Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance)

Resources:

Recordings Available: Di Linke: The Yiddish Immigrant left from Popular Front to Cold War (Cornell University Jewish Studies Program)
Happy May Day! 40% off ALL books - until May 17 (Verso Books)

Announcements:

Recovering the History of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the United States - May 13 (Friends of Puerto Rico Initiative)
Book Talk - Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America - May 13 (Labor and Working Class History Association)
When they push back, we push harder - Pass the Climate and Community Investment Act - New York - May 18 (Peoples Climate Movement - NY)
Power In a Pension - Labor, Private Equity, and Climate Justice - May 19 (Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies)
Labor and the Media - Labor Adapts Its Message to Changing Media Environments - May 20 (NY Labor History Association)

 

Free shots on US! Celebrate Vaccinco De Mayo!  --  cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz

Lalo Alcaraz
May 5, 2021
Mexican Judge

Re: Last Night Was Joe Biden’s Moment. May There Be Many More.
 

As long as members of the working class stand the risk of losing everything they have from one big unexpected medical bill, all the nice promises aren't enough.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Re: 'We Need to Think Bigger': Jamaal Bowman Delivers Progressive Response to Biden
 

I know we always need to think bigger, but that guy in the White House is thinking bigger than any President since LBJ. Hasn't he kind of seized the moment?  Certainly more than anyone would have predicted. He seems to be doing quite a few of the things you cats want.

Frank Stricker

      =====

Amen!

Louis Guida
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Re: May Day 1971 Was a Day Against War
 

Here from five years ago, Rennie Davis, of blessed memory, recalls the May, 1971 demonstrations against the Vietnam War. In the comments, via Portside & Jacobin magazine, Steve Early recalls those events we worked so hard to put together.

Daniel Millstone
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Re: It Only Takes a Few People to Change Your State’s Congressional Seats
 

Wonder how many of the population changes are due to people being too scared of deportation etc. to submit info.

Sandy Grubb
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Re: Where the Federal Government’s Charter School Program Went Wrong
 

Um, it was a scam to funnel tax dollars into the pockets of a few and starve the government of funding. Standard Reaganomics.

Cliff Gulliver
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Whatever He Says  --  cartoon by Mike Luckovich
 

Mike Luckovich
May 6, 2021
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Re: The White Republic and the Struggle for Racial Justice
 

Speaking for myself, having been a longtime proponent of Bob's school of anti-racist politics, I think there are missing elements in his characterization of mass movements of the past. Is it true that "The only period of U.S. history where class was the main animator of a mass fight for social justice was the 1930s"? There are concrete reasons that socialists have argued otherwise for 150+ years. 

I agree we should not essentialize class struggle as union organizing and strikes, ie syndicalism. But I think something else is being discussed, namely, has cross-racial action by workers been important outside the CIO years. Alongside this question is the matter of the role of workers - whose social role is defined by their class, ie their relation to the process of producing and reproducing capitalist society - in those cross-class social and political struggles throughout US history, aka social movements for democracy and social equality, and the importance of the economic factor in each of these.
Here's Cedric Johnson on the flip side of this issue, not cross-class anti-racist politics, but interracial working class solidarity:

"From the most cynical view, the pursuit of a working-class, anti-capitalist politics is always elusive and impotent. Working-class solidarity, however, like all other forms of alliance and common cause, is forged through politics, an imperfect and unwieldy process of discovering and advancing common interests through debate, conflict, bonding, experimentation, sustained work, failures and victories. Such solidarity is not given, nor permanent. Its value is not intrinsic, but rather its worth should be measured by the degree to which anti-capitalist solidarity alters the balance of class forces in a progressive way, and imposes more just, non-alienated, non-exploitative modes of working and living. Differences of opinion and passion are preconditions of political life. We should not be uneasy about these social realities, or unnerved by the difficult work of building counterpower."

Ethan Young

      =====

Bob Wing describes our current government as a White Republic or less provocatively as a racist authoritarian government.  It should not be an occasion of glee, however, to see the unraveling and destruction of one of our two political parties, the GOP.  In their headlong rush to set up a white dictatorship and do away with the need for a messy voting system, the fascist right wing has captured the once progressive party of Abraham Lincoln. During many years of the long civil rights movement, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery and race hatred (the party of George Wallace and Strom Thurman) while the Republican Party was the progressive dependable ally of African Americans (the party of Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman). Ronald Reagan changed all that when he opened his presidential campaign in at the Nashoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1980, where our civil rights workers, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered by the KKK during Freedom Summer in 1964. Now, the two parties have switched messages.  One of them is bound to die.

The GOP extremists are now in the process of carrying out a purge of the few remaining women and men of reason, like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. Bob Wing puts this situation in stark terms, “Far from recoiling at Trump’s failed coup of January 6, the GOP is avidly regrouping around him and launching an even more ruthless campaign of voter disenfranchisement to seize power. The polarization between racist authoritarianism and a multiracial democracy is white-hot.”

There may be some positive results of this GOP takeover and their recent attempt to overturn the outcome of our presidential election. A majority of the U.S. population has seen the fragility of our democracy and that democracy, equality, inclusion, and diversity  are values worth fighting for. It will be interesting over the next few years to keep track of the final end of the Republican Party.  Will it become a tiny third party, with tiny Donald Trump as its supreme leader, or will it go the way of the Whig Party and disappear, maybe to be replaced by an actual conservative party of believers in small government, low taxes, and democratic elections?

For years I have followed Bob Wing’s writings, learning from his theories of social and political change.  My sociological and historical abilities sadly are not up to a response to all that he is saying in this essay, but I do think that CHANGING THE CULTURE OF POLICING will be a large part of restoring our country to democratic rule.

The Chauvin verdict, for instance, is not complete justice. George Floyd can’t be brought back to life, but it might prove to be a hard-won first step, that of accountability. Take a look at what it took to get him indicted, tried and convicted. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the Minneapolis Mayor, the chief of police and the whole criminal justice system in the state of Minnesota apparently decided that they really wanted an indictment, trial and conviction in the George Floyd case as a signal to rank in file police that such outrageous behavior in public can no longer be tolerated. The resulting guilty verdict also depended on clear filmed evidence, national and world demonstrations, the total mobilization of the state’s criminal justice system and wall to wall tv coverage.  When they mobilized in earnest to convict, the authorities in Minnesota were saying to the cops on the beat, “don’t be fr+king stupid, you can’t do this sh+t in public, with cameras running.”  It gives us a bad name.

There are various reasons it is difficult to reform policing.  Daily Kos says this about Police unions: “More than 85% of police contracts in major cities around the country include language limiting oversight or discipline of officers. While police union contracts provide generous vacation packages and oversee officer salaries, these contracts also allow for massive budgets and overprotected job security even if an officer kills a nonviolent person in the line of duty.” QUALIFIED IMMUNITY in the United States, according to the dictionary, is “a legal principle that grants government officials performing discretionary functions immunity from civil suits unless the plaintiff can show that the accused official violated clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.  Atlanta rapper, Killer Mike, in an op ed said, “there will be no fixing… public trust (in policing) – or the law enforcement system as a whole – without first ending the legal doctrine known as qualified immunity.”

Police officers have a tough job where they have to make quick, sometimes life and death decisions.  In the moment they do not have the hindsight that becomes available to others with slow motion film, etc.  Qualified immunity protects government employees from being taken to task for assaults on your constitutional rights – in this instance, your eighth amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of the state – so long as those employees did not violate “clearly established” law. “Of all the predatory elements of American policing,” according to Killer Mike on the listserv Portside,  “(and there are many, from legal chokeholds to monthly arrest quotas to the NYPD’s infamous stop-and-frisk policy) the qualified immunity doctrine is perhaps the single linchpin that holds the entire machine together.” “Without ending qualified immunity,” Killer Mike says, “there’s no way to hold bad cops (individually) accountable for their violent crimes against the American people. The system will perpetuate itself largely undisturbed, the violence will rage on and on, and Black communities all over the country will keep on living in fear of the very people sworn allegedly to protect them.” Police departments can (already) be held accountable if the will to do so is there; (individual cops however,) can not be held accountable, under current law, through civil suits.

It is also notoriously impossible for District Attorneys to adequately prosecute their own police.  Special outside prosecutors should always be used.  This small, common- sense reform has proven to be extremely difficult if not impossible to achieve.  District Attorneys feel that they must be on good terms with the police personnel under their jurisdiction because the DA depends on his or her police officers to help them win cases in court. Winning cases helps them to be reelected. Consequently, police officers have gotten used to getting the benefit of the doubt.  Their word is accepted routinely over that of the victim.  Citizen’s police review boards are also incredibly difficult to get passed by city councils.

This causes frustrated community organizers and activists to sometimes ill-advisedly advocate a slogan calling for the “defunding” of police departments.  There are also those urging police to be *more* violent, including at least one President of the United States. They often deliberately  misunderstand or misinterpret the “defund” slogan. With proper legislation, however, I think psychologists and social workers could be funded to respond [along with police] to domestic violence or psychotic behavior. This kind of legislation might be seen as funding *to aid the police. *

Radical reforms, being proposed in the wake of the Chauvin trial, may not be so radical after all.  Patrol officers, for instance, might be deployed on the beat without deadly weapons, while having swat teams in reserve. The U.S. averages about 3 police killing per day, over 1000 per year. “How many people do cops kill annually in Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland combined? Zero.” (according to columnist Killer Mike on Portside.)

Without that courageous group of citizens using cell phones to record the casual murder of Mr. Floyd, would we ever have heard of Chauvin or Floyd?

In the civil rights movement we had a freedom song called Freedom is a Constant Struggle.  After a brief period of Reconstruction following our first civil war, during which the freedmen were protected by the 13th and 14th Amendments, the southern states launched a sustained effort to reestablish slavery.  Those amendments outlawed slavery in the nation, with an important loophole - “Except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This loophole paved the way for our country's burgeoning prison labor system, thus creating the world's largest prison population at 2.3 million persons.” Capitalism is good at finding loopholes, so police, once again, were tasked with arresting as many black men as possible, in order to have enough convicts for the southern states to hire out, in the convict leasing system, as forced labor in mines, factories, and plantations.  This is slavery with another name.

“The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including former enslaved people—and guaranteed all citizens “equal protection of the laws.” One of the three amendments passed during the Reconstruction era to abolish slavery came with a huge caveat,  equal protection was guaranteed but it was still up to the police to treat all citizens equally. The answer to the question, where do we go from here, is to give each other a lot of grace as we seriously undertake the hard work of *ending* our caste system based on racism and genocide set in stone.

Bob Zellner

Re: Heroes But Not Saints: Why We Shouldn't 'Cancel' Flawed Progressive Icons

If we require our progressive and radical heroes to be saints we won't have many people left to admire.

Jose Luis Medina
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

Very informative. Thanks

Sarah Woodhead
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

this is what I have been saying for a long time

Alex Melody Torres
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

Good piece 

Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

Does this apply to Scott Stringer right now?

Marta Schmidt
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

This was a wonderful article. I have been thinking for years about who we "cancel" by removing their statues. I have wondered what would happen to all the wonderful people, who, as people of their own times would today be considered misogynist and whose statues we would have to remove. ALMOST EVERYONE!

Yes, remove the statues of people who were ONLY FAMOUS because of their despicable actions; like Civil War figures who would never be known except for their roles in the war. I can also find justification in removing statues of good people whose statues depict them in despicable ways, but only those specific statues (like one of Lincoln). But do not remove the statues of those basically decent people who did good things but had traits we would now describe negatively.

Remove Gandhi? He was a misogynist. Remove Douglas? After the abolition of slavery that the suffragists helped fight for, he didn't help the Suffragists because he felt Black problems were far more urgent. The Suffragists eventually won the vote through racist arguments after being deserted by Douglas. So, remove all the suffragists that took racist positions? Remove anyone who was homophobic at any point in their lives? I wouldn't pass that test. And many of the now-feminist men I know, including my late husband, who became a feminist very early, had early misogynist positions. As a matter of fact, I also had some misogynist opinions at one time. Jesse Jackson, who early on opposed women's reproductive choice and later supported it because women had supported his Civil Rights work--not because they deserved to be treated as human beings. AND EVEN Eleanor Roosevelt, who when a young woman, opposed women's suffrage.

Actually, I can think of very few great men who were known for taking feminist positions before their times--however, even those forward looking positions could be seen by some as "misogynist" by today's standards: Jesus, who had many women in his entourage (they probably still did the cooking); Mohammed who limited the number of wives a man could have and prescribed how to treat them all equally; John Stuart Mill, who made many feminist points in his writings; W.E.B. DuBois who worked for women's suffrage saying that as long as some people didn't have the vote, others weren't assured of keeping it; John Lewis, who compared sexism and homophobia to racism and said that the civil rights movement fought for everyone;

Margaret Sanger accepted the "science" of her day on racial issues. She was a wonderful step in the never-ending battle for women to be considered as human as White Heterosexual American-born Men even as she accepted then current "facts" about people with various demographics.

This issue needs to be better thought out. Yes, delete Dr. Seuss' racist pages and replace them with positive words and images--but "erase" Dr. Seuss from our children's lexicons: NEVER! And forget what Margaret Sanger accomplished: NEVER!

Arlene Halfon

Re: Gabriel García Márquez and Magical Internationalism
 

I first saw the title of this article and it was my immediate thought to pass it over. I'd figured it was some other useless, overly academic paean to a famous writer.  Fortunately, I started to read out of respect for the author, and so glad I did. Not a only a great writer, but a great person. So much I didn't know. Few artists have the moral and political stature of Márquez. I salute him, I salute this article's author and, of course, the  translator, thanks, Portside, 

Mike Liston

The Science Gods  --  cartoon by  Mike Stanfill
 

Mike Stanfill
April 27, 2021
Raging Pencils

APALA Calls on the Biden Administration to Immediately Impose Sanctions Against the Military Junta of Myanmar
 

May Day or International Workers Day is celebrated throughout the world. The workers of Myanmar courageously took to the streets to protest the military junta that staged a coup on February 1, 2021. 

The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO, stands in solidarity with the workers of Myanmar, and calls on the President Joseph Biden Administration to immediately impose sanctions against the military junta of Myanmar, including the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise.

The international community has condemned the Myanmar military’s coup which overthrew the democratically elected government leaders of the National League for Democracy (NLD), including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. We need to increase economic pressure on the military junta by cutting off the funding source that is being used to kill and attack the people of Myanmar.

The Myanmar people, organized by unions and students, have resisted the military’s take-over and have organized street protests, strikes, and international campaigns, known as the Civil Disobedience Movement. The military and police have responded to protests with violence, including using war-grade weapons and firing live ammunition into crowds. Over 750 people have been killed, with 4,484 arrested since February 1, 2021.

Over 10 unionists have been killed and over 80 unionists have been arrested or have been issued warrants, and labor leaders are now in hiding as they continue to lead the resistance movement from underground locations within Myanmar.

There are nearly 200,000 Burmese Americans residing in the United States.  The Burmese American community is deeply concerned about the human rights violations in Myanmar, and are calling for the restoration of democracy.

APALA Organizing and Civic Engagement Fellow and Michigan Chapter member Dim Mang states, "As a Chin person, I see the military’s actions as one in a long line of oppression and blatant overturning of the will of the people of Burma. This is an issue of ethnic solidarity as well, because though the detained NLD members and other activists should be released, we must not forget about the decades of armed conflict and human rights abuses before this coup - a lot of which the NLD abetted as well. As an organizer based in the United States, this issue really does fall into a bigger picture of global solidarity against militarization and in advocacy of self-determination."

Support the movement by donating to this strike fund and learn more by checking out this toolkit created by Dim.

The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), AFL-CIO was founded in 1992 as the first and only national organization for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) union members to advance worker, immigrant and civil rights. Learn more at www.apalanet.org. 

Recordings Available: Di Linke: The Yiddish Immigrant left from Popular Front to Cold War (Cornell University Jewish Studies Program)

After much hard work, the six sessions of Di Linke: The Yiddish Immigrant Left from Popular Front to Cold War are available for viewing on Cornell Cast. The list of speakers and presentations for each session can be found here: Di Linke Conference. 

We encourage you to share the videos with colleagues, friends and family members. Let us know if you are interested in contributing to our oral history project about lived experiences in Di Linke’s larger cultural world. We welcome your feedback and hope to see you at future programs. Please contact jewishstudies@cornell.edu for more information or questions.  

Sincerely,  

Conference Planning Committee  

Elissa Sampson, Jennifer Young, Bob Zecker  

Resources: 

• Cornell University ILR School’s Kheel Center, Catherwood Library IWO/JPFO digital collections landing page:  https://digital.library.cornell.edu/collections/iwo-jpfo   
• Kheel Center website:  https://catherwood.library.cornell.edu/kheel/   
• Guide to Kheel’s Yiddish Left collections:  https://guides.library.cornell.edu/jewishleft   
• Cornell combined RMC/Kheel collection guides: https://rare.library.cornell.edu/finding-aids-for-archival-and-manuscript-collections/  
• Collections and services for Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University Libraries (the University Archives and Belfer Audio Archive). Highlights include William Gropper, Earl Browder, and Langston Hughes papers. Contact scrc@syr.edu  
• Queens Museum Gropper show:  https://queensmuseum.org/2015/11/bearing-witness  
• Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives:  https://guides.nyu.edu/tamimentlibrary  
• Village Preservation (GVSHP), 80 5^th Ave: https://www.villagepreservation.org/2020/06/25/no-jim-crow-in-the-iwo-the-rallying-cry-heard-from-80-fifth-avenue-for-a-quarter-century/  
• The Ruth Rubin collection at YIVO: https://ruthrubin.yivo.org/exhibits/show/ruth-rubin-sound-archive/home  

We would love to tell you more about upcoming events and our programs. Please click here to sign up for our monthly enews.  

Support for Di Linke conference was provided by the Central New York Humanities Corridor, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Catherwood Library Cornell ILR School Kheel Center, Cornell Jewish Studies Program, Syracuse Jewish Studies Program, Society for the Humanities, Cornell Departments of History, Anthropology, Near Eastern Studies, and Government, and the American Studies Program. 

Co-sponsors: Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation; New York University, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

Happy May Day! 40% off ALL books - until May 17 (Verso Books)
 

Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world, publishing one hundred books a year.

On May 1, 1886, workers all over the country took to the streets to demand an eight hour workday and a more just economy. 

The power of the American labor movement is at a low point, but we're seeing positive signs of revitalization, including an uptick in media workers (Verso staff among them!) Support the PRO Act for worker power and take to the streets as part of the international movement for working-class liberation.

To celebrate May Day we have 40% off all books until
Monday, May 17 at 11:59PM EST.

See our May Day reading here

Verso Books
6 Meard Street
London, W1F 0EG
United Kingdom

Recovering the History of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the United States - May 13 (Friends of Puerto Rico Initiative)
 

Book Talk - Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America - May 13 (Labor and Working Class History Association)
 

The Labor and Working Class History Association Pandemic Book Talks Presents:

Walter Johnson  --  The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 7PM EST

From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures.

Please register in advance and join us via zoom

Labor and Working Class History Association  
LAWCHA
226 Carr Building (East Campus)
Box 90719
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708-0719

Email: lawcha.office@gmail.com

When they push back, we push harder - Pass the Climate and Community Investment Act - New York - May 18 (Peoples Climate Movement - NY)
 

We’re in the final stretch to #PassTheCCIA! 

New York State’s legislative session ends June 10th, which means we have only five weeks to get the Climate and Community Investment Act passed. We need to get the CCIA across the finish line so we can make polluters pay for the damage they have done to our state and our communities, and use those dollars to fund a just transition to a renewable energy economy. The fossil fuel industry is pushing back against the bill, so we need to push even harder! 

On May 18th, there will be rallies in support of the CCIA all across the state. Join us in front of Governor Cuomo’s office to demand that he and the NYS Legislature get this bill done this year! 

What:    Rally and take action on-site to #PassTheCCIA

When:   Tuesday, May 18, 5:30pm

Where:  Outside Gov. Cuomo’s office, 633 3rd Ave., Manhattan

RSVP here.

We hope to see you there! Please spread the word!  

And if you’d like to learn more about the plan to get this bill passed, join NY Renews this Friday, May 7, at 12pm to go over the details and get plugged into the campaign.

Peoples Climate Movement - NY  
119 West 23rd Street, Suite 900
New York, NY 10011

Power In a Pension - Labor, Private Equity, and Climate Justice - May 19 (Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies)
 

May 19, 2021 | 10AM - 11:30AM PT |

REGISTER

Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies
Smith Hall, M266
Box 353530 Seattle, WA 98195-3530

office 206.543.7946

Labor and the Media - Labor Adapts Its Message to Changing Media Environments - May 20 (NY Labor History Association)
 

Thursday, May 20, 2021  --  7 p.m.

Panelists:

• Dr. Brian Dolber, Assistant Professor of Communication, California State University, San Marcos; author of Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era
• Dr. Tobias Higbe, UCLA Labor Studies Chair and Associate Director of UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment
• Elana Levin, Director at New Media Mentors (Netroots Nation) and Co-Founder of Organizing 2.0

Organized by the New York Labor History Association and co-sponsored by ILCA, the Metro NY Labor Communications Council, United Hebrew Trades, the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, and the New York Jewish Labor Committee.