Tidbits – Nov. 03, 2022 – Reader Comments, Elections – High Inflation, Huge Profits, Why Not Price Freeze; Politicians Giving Medical Advice; Lula Wins!; Mayor, UFT Push Medicare Advantage; Public Health; Mike Davis Tribute; Angela Y. Davis

Targeting consumers to address inflation is a choice the Fed makes, it could target price gouging companies, like energy companies, but it chooses not to. There’s a reason interest hikes are not bringing down inflation and that’s because it targets consumers and we aren’t responsible for inflation, the companies are. Tanking the economy and driving down wages will not help , but they’re doing it anyway.

E Beth Davis

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Re: With Ads, Imagery and Words, Republicans Inject Race Into Campaigns

With Ads, Imagery and Words, Republicans Inject Race Into Campaigns

Earl Marty Price

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

=====

This is happening in NC for n at least two races I've noticed: Forsyth Co. D.A. race and U S. Senate race. There are likely many more--oh, yes, one Supreme Court race

Linda Gillison

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Just Relax, Leave It to You and Local Politicians -- cartoon by Michael de Adder

Michael de Adder

Toronto Star

May 23, 2019
Toronto Star

Mehmet Oz said local politicians should have a say in abortion. Democrats see an opportunity.

At Tuesday's Senate debate, Republican Mehmet Oz said abortion law should be up to states to decide — including local politicians.

by Julia Terruso and Jonathan Tamari

October 26, 2022
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Asked about a proposed national ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Oz said it should be up to states to decide — including local politicians.

“I want women, doctors, local political leaders letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves,” Oz said.

Lula da Silva Wins! - A Great Victory for Brazil, A Great Victory for the Planet

Re: Brazil Ejects Bolsonaro and Brings Back the Former Leftist Leader Lula

Great news! This brings me hope that change is happening.

Diane Fentress

Re: UFT Prez Doubles-Down on Medicare Advantage Push in Face of Fierce Opposition

(posting on Portside Labor)

Having worked in a hospital IT department for many years, I think that Medicare is a good thing. It is straightforward. Any initiatives to dilute it and Balkanize it are only in the interests of the insurance companies. Improve it, yes. Chip away at it, no.

Sonia Cobbins

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

=====

Good article. Mulgrew and other MLC leaders are engaging n cynical scare tactics and disinformation to manipulate retirees into accepting their plan as better than what the City will impose. I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist, but the MLC collusion with the Adams administration seems pretty clear.

Rachelle Kivanoski

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Eyes Peeled -- cartoon by Mike Luckovich

Mike Luckovich

December 24, 2017
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Re: The Economy Breaks Down on Day One of a Rail Strike

(posting on Portside Labor)

...and it will not be the fault of the Rail workers

Karl Edler

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

=====

Workers matter!

Chay Allen

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

=====

The best evidence I can think of that we must honor workers and their dignity!!! ESSENTIAL WORKERS, whom we can apparently prevent from striking for their welfare--salaries, working conditions, basic human dignity!

Linda

Re: ‘Democracy on the Line’: Brazil’s Election and the Bolsonaro Disinformation Ecosystem

Interesting comparison to events in the US. I had a FB friend a while back who was from Indonesia, he said similar events are happening there.

you should read The Jakarta Method - it’s a modern history of how the US toppled democratic regimes in both Indonesia and Brazil

Alvin T Ruff

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Re: Mike Davis Could See the Future

RIP such an influential thinker —

Julia Nevarez

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

=====

Via Portside & The New Yorker comes this sweet look back at the life and work of Mike Davis who died earlier this week (and with whom many of us worked and played). Have you read City of Quartz yet?

Daniel Millstone

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Re: Our Ancestors Ate a Paleo Diet. It Had Carbs.

This article is a really good look at our early life and the insistence of Paleo Diet advocates. And at last I have the opportunity to add the obvious point. We survived the bounty and scarcity of food because we humans are adaptable. That meant when food was scarce we ate what ever we could find including rotten meat abandoned by a top predator, and fruit eaters from above, insects, grubs, fungus and worms. And in fact, there are some current situations and locations where that diet is still all that is available.

I have also wondered why and who created and widely promote this fantasy. Ya gotta wonder who benefits! Maybe the meat industry as people are shifting away from "carnivory" (my word) industry faced with loosing its market as people shift to more healthy and broader diet?

Claire O'Connor

=====

No news here about "paleo" diet.

Anthropologist long ago documented the highly variable diets of hunter-gatherers depending on climate.

And Richard Lee documented - and measured - in the 1950s-60s diet of south African Kung bushmen where most diet including protein came from gathering rather than hunting

Richard Butsch

Tell Congress to Keep Copyright Out of Must-Pass Legislation (The Electronic Frontier Foundation)

In 2020, two copyright bills were snuck into law. Let's stop it from happening again.

In 2020, two bills on copyright made it into the year-end omnibus bill. That meant that an unconstitutional proposal and one that no one in the public had ever seen before were made law, without having to stand on their own merits. This year, we want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

TAKE ACTION

We know of three bad proposals which could be included in 2022's year-end bills:

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which would create link taxes and devastate the ability of users to trace back information to its source online
The Stopping Harmful Offers on Platforms by Screening Against Fakes in E-commerce Act (SHOP SAFE), which would mandate filtering for trademarks—which could include simple words—on any online service by which a person could buy or sell.
The Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies Copyright Act, which would mandate a slew of copyright filters which would devastate legal expression online and harm online security.

This list doesn’t include any secretly-written bills, like 2020’s felony streaming law. We want to make sure Congress knows that any bill that would restrict online expression in the name of a so-called intellectual property interest has no place in must-pass legislation.

Tell Congress to stop the copyright creep.

Thank you,

Katharine Trendacosta

Activism Team

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit defending online civil liberties. We promote digital innovation, defend free speech, fight illegal surveillance, and protect rights and freedoms for all as our use of technology grows. Find out more at https://eff.org..

Fixing US public health infrastructure for 1% of annual military budget

Nancy Krieger

October 27, 2022

The Lancet

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)02126-2

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the appearance of monkeypox, and the re-emergence of polio, US national reports1 and journalism2,3 are increasingly focusing on the longstanding, woeful underfunding of US public health infrastructure and its lethal consequences. At issue are the insufficient personnel, insufficient core funding, inadequate and antiquated data systems (both software and hardware), and dismal integration of data across local, state, tribal, and federal levels. The deadly consequence is persistent major gaps in urgently needed, timely, and complete data on who is getting ill, tested, hospitalised, treated, recovering, and dying from myriad ailments and exposures.1-3

The solution to this dire situation is consistently framed as a being a very expensive overhaul and integration of data systems from local to federal.1-3 Estimated costs for such data modernisation are reported to range from US$7 *84 billion over the next 5 years (ie, $1 *6 billion per year)2 to $37 billion over the next decade (ie, $3 *7 billion per year) 2 to $4 *5 billion per year.1 These indeed appear to be large sums, dwarfing the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's $100 million budget for data modernisation2 and the $862 million allocated for public health emergency preparedness programmes.1

However, some perspective is warranted. To wit, expenditure on the order of $1 *6 billion to $4 *5 billion per year was equivalent to 0 *2-0 *6% of the $740 billion US federal military budget for 2021, according to the National Priorities Project https://www.nationalpriorities.org/interactive-data/trade-offs/ In the context of a COVID-19 pandemic that has already killed nearly 1 *1 million people in the USA 3 (ie, ten times the total US military casualties https://www.statista.com/statistics/1009819/total-us-military-fatalities-in-american-wars-1775-present/ in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined-or a quarter of the military fatalities in World War 2), the duty to protect the public includes protecting the public's health. Surely the US public health infrastructure is worth fixing for less than 1% of the annual US military budget. I declare no competing interests.

Nancy Krieger

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115, USA

1 McKillop M, Lieberman DA. The impact of chronic underfunding on America's public health system: trends, risks, and recommendations. Washington, DC: Trust for America's Health, 2022.

2 LaFraniere S. 'Very harmful' lack of data blunts US response to outbreaks. Sept 20, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/us/ politics/covid-data-outbreaks.html (accessed Oct 12, 2022).

3 Mandavilli A. New infectious threats are coming. The US probably won't contain them. Sept 30, 2022. https://www.nytimes. com/2022/09/29/health/pandemicpreparedness-covid-monkeypox.html (accessed Oct 12, 2022).

An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders - Museum Without Walls - New York City (Culture Now)

In the 36th St. subway station

36th St. & 4th Ave.

Brooklyn, NY

United States

Owen Smith lauds the designers, engineers, and workers who built the New York City subway system with these large and lively mosaics. The influence of WPA-era and 1930s Mexican muralists on this design, which celebrates the dignity of labor, is clear. An MTA Arts for Transit project.

Courtesy of MTA Arts for Transit

Culture Now - Art, Architecture & History in the Public Realm

Fight Like Hell: A Tribute to Mike Davis - November 4 (Haymarket Books)

¡Mike Davis, presente! Join three longtime allies of Mike Davis (1946-2022) for a discussion of his life, legacy, and inspiration.

Friday, November 4, 2022, 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM EDT

RSVP - Get Tickets here

***Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and live captioning will be provided.***

Speakers:

Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an activist and Marxist-Feminist in the Black Power and abolitionist movements since the late 1960s. In the 1980s, her book Women, Race and Class helped to establish the concept of intersectionality. She also helped to develop the concept of prison abolition, especially in her books Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire. Recently, Dr. Davis has written about the international movement in solidarity with Palestine in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her work helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for the #DefundthePolice movement. Davis’s memoir was recently published in a new edition by Haymarket Books.

Geri Silva, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, has spent the past 40 years in all forms of struggle for human, political, and economic rights. Her activity covers the span from immigration rights to welfare rights to the right to decent housing for all in need. For the past 20-plus years she has fought against the rampant and ongoing abuses in the courts and at the hands of the police. Silva is a founding member of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) in 1992, Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes (FACTS) in 1996, Fair Chance Project (FCP) in 2009, California Families Against Solitary Confinement (CFASC) in 2011, and FUEL—Families United to End LWOP (Life Without Parole) in 2017.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent publications include “Beyond Bratton” (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds., Verso); “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds., Verso); a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg (U Georgia Press); a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (HLT Quan, ed., Pluto); Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso), and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). Forthcoming projects include Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket). Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. In April 2019 novelist Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in The New York Times Magazine. Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books.

Webinar: They Who Sang to End the War in Indochina - November 7 (Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee)

They Who Sang to End the War

November 7, 7 p.m. ET

Register by clicking here.

Peter Yarrow, Reggie Harris and Sonny Ochs

Moderated by Heather Booth

First in a series of webinars with singers whose creative voices inspired and were shaped by the peace movement.

First in a series of webinars with singers whose creative voices inspired and were shaped by the peace movement.

As a performer and activist, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) uses his music to engage and entertain but, more importantly, to help create a more just and peaceful world. Through such efforts, beginning in the early 1960’s, the music of Peter, Paul and Mary became, for literally millions of people, the genesis of their activism and a life-long commitment to advancing positive social change. Peter’s gift for songwriting has produced some of the most moving songs in the Peter, Paul & Mary repertoire including “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” “Day is Done,” “Light One Candle,” and “The Great Mandala."

Reggie Harris is an innovative guitarist, a fearlessly creative vocalist, and an engaging storyteller whose concert performances are infused with joy. It’s clear to all that he deeply loves singing and that it is more than his work. But that’s not all.

Uniquely committed to “music as a community building vehicle,” Reggie’s music shares insightful perspectives on issues of life, history, education and human rights. In the spirit of his mentors, Pete Seeger and Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, (founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock), Reggie is a master songleader who loves to help people discover that they can make a difference at any age, wherever they may live. https://reggieharrismusic.com/

Sonny Ochs is a radio host, a concert producer, a major festival volunteer in many capacities, and a volunteer at folk conferences. She is the creator of Wisdom of the Elders which is a much loved event which began in 2010 at Northeast Regional Folk Alliance and is now a monthly podcast on the NERFA webpage. She is also Phil Ochs's sister and has produced Phil Ochs Song Nights for 39 years internationally. She is the host of Folk Music & Other Stuff - a monthly radio show on Folk Music Notebook. Sonny was presented with a Spirit of Folk Award at Folk Alliance International in 2019. https://www.sonnyochs.com/

Heather Booth is one of the country's leading strategists about progressive issue campaigns and driving issues in elections. She started organizing in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war and women's movements of the 1960s. She started JANE, an underground abortion service in 1965, before Roe. There is a new HBO documentary about this called The JANES, and there is a new Hollywood film version of the story, Call JANE.

She was the founding Director and is now President of the Midwest Academy, training social change leaders and organizers. She has been involved in and managed political campaigns and was the Training Director of the Democratic National Committee. In 2000, she was the Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, which helped to increase African American election turnout. She was the lead consultant, directing the founding of the Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2005.

In 2008, she was the director of the Health Care Campaign for the AFL-CIO. In 2009, she directed the campaign passing President Obamaâ€™s first budget. In 2010 she was the founding director of Americans for Financial Reform, fighting to regulate the financial industry. She was the national coordinator for the coalition around marriage equality and the 2013 Supreme Court decision. She was strategic advisor to the Alliance for Citizenship (the largest coalition of the immigration reform campaign). She was the field director for the 2017 campaign to stop the tax giveaways to millionaires and billionaires She directed Progressive and Seniors Outreach for the Biden/Harris campaign. She has been a consultant on many other issues and with many other organizations. She is a member of the consulting firm Democracy Partners.

There is a film about her life in organizing, "Heather Booth: Changing the World." It has been shown on PBS/World Channel stations around the country.

Resources

Protest Music of the Vietnam War by Anne Meisenzahl and Roger Peace

United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2017, updated September 2021, http://peacehistory-usfp.org/protest-music-vietnam-war

Justin Brummer's playlist of 390+ protest songs

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL549B0CC0FC2AC8AC

Our webinars are free to watch, but not to produce. Tax deductible contributions to cover costs gratefully accepted by clicking here.

An Evening with Angela Y. Davis - in Conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - New York - December 2 (Brooklyn Academy of Music and Greenlight Bookstore in Association with Haymarket Books with Collaboration from The New York Review of Books)

Friday, Dec. 2 at 7pm

$15 event only; $40 with signed hardcover copy of An Autobiography

Tickets here

Join Angela Y. Davis for an intimate conversation focused on the new edition of her classic memoir—now featuring a major new introduction. A political activist at the cutting edge of the Black Liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements, Davis gives a powerful and commanding account of her early years in struggle in An Autobiography. First published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, it describes her journey from a childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century, to her work for abolitionist feminism today.

Davis will be in conversation with award-winning scholar and public intellectual Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. She recently coauthored Abolition. Feminism. Now. with Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an award-winning scholar and public intellectual whose scholarship examines racism and public policy, inequality, Black politics, radical politics and social movements in the United States, both in historical and contemporary contexts. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and Race for Profit, and editor of How We Get Free. She was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2021.

Tidbits – Nov. 03, 2022 – Reader Comments, Elections – High Inflation, Huge Profits, Why Not Price Freeze; Politicians Giving Medical Advice; Lula Wins!; Mayor, UFT Push Medicare Advantage; Public Health; Mike Davis Tribute; Angela Y. Davis

Take Action:

Tell Congress to Keep Copyright Out of Must-Pass Legislation (The Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Resources:

Fixing US public health infrastructure for 1% of annual military budget (Nancy Krieger - The Lancet) An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders - Museum Without Walls - New York City (Culture Now)

Announcements:

Fixing US public health infrastructure for 1% of annual military budget (Nancy Krieger - The Lancet)
An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders - Museum Without Walls - New York City (Culture Now)