Portside

[This item has been updated with additional information.]
A President Is Not a King, or Is He?

15 YEARS AGO, on December 19, 2008, President George Bush announced that he had the authority to order the U.S. Treasury to loan two of the world's biggest corporations, General Motors and Chrysler, $13.4 billion in order to avert their slide into bankruptcy. Bush's action might have resulted in a constitutional crisis, because the money for the bailout had been appropriated by Congress for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was specifically limited to provide assistance to "financial institutions." Bush had tried, and failed, to get Congress to agree to bail-out GM and Chrysler, so he decided to ignore the legislative mandate and declared that he was not bound to obey it. Even though Congress had excellent grounds to attempt to stop Bush's blatantly illegal move, lawmakers were satisfied to merely complain. Ultimately, the federal rescue of GM and Chrysler cost U.S. taxpayers $10.2 billion.   https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/19/bush-bails-out-us-automakers-…

Justice for Crimes Against Humanity in Argentina, But for How Long?

40 YEARS AGO, on December 20, 1983, an Argentinian court indicted the last president to serve during the 8-year military dictatorship that resulted in the death or disappearance of 30 thousand people, the vast majority of them leftists. Reynaldo Bignone was eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in his government's systematic use of kidnapping, torture and murder. He died in a prison hospital.  Today, the brand-new Trump-like president of Argentina, Javier Milei, questions just how bad the Army's brutal reign of terror was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_state_terrorism_in_Argentina

A Safe, Legal, Way to Relieve Stress

110 YEARS AGO, on December 21, 1913, the Sunday New York World published the first known crossword puzzle, invented by journalist Arthur Wynne. The diversion caught on and within a decade most U.S. newspapers published them regularly. https://time.com/5811396/crossword-history/

Where the Heck Was OSHA and EPA?

15 YEARS AGO, on December 22, 2008, a flood of more than a billion gallons of highly toxic industrial waste suddenly covered more than 300 acres in central Tennessee, about 30 miles west of Knoxville. It had been released by the sudden collapse of a faulty retaining wall surrounding a waste pond full of coal-ash slurry created by a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) coal-fired power plant. 

It was the largest and one of the most impactful acute environmental disasters to ever occur in the U.S., and it is surprisingly unfamiliar to most people. It resulted in the premature deaths of an unknown number (but 30 at the minimum) cleanup workers. 

The size of the release (1.1 billion gallons) is hard for most people to wrap their heads around, or at least it is for me.  I understand it better when I realize that a flood of 1.1 billion gallons would cover Central Park to a depth of about four feet. (For those who can't easily picture the size of Central Park, it is about two-and-a-half miles long and half-a-mile wide.) Imagine Central Park covered with water so deep it would be chest-high for an average person. 

Contrary to a "fact" sheet published by the TVA a week after the spill, stating spill was "not hazardous," the slurry was found to be radioactive and to contain dangerous levels of arsenic, copper, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel, and thallium, all of them toxic. Initially the TVA estimated that the spill would take four to six weeks to clean up instead of the 7 years and more than $1 billion required.  At least 30 members of the clean-up crew, who did not receive essential protection from the mess, have died prematurely as a result of their exposures. If you've read this far, you won't be disappointed by this 5-minute video: https://youtu.be/ChiYfik-GSY
 

Integrating Carnegie Hall, Onstage and Off

85 YEARS AGO, on December 23, 1938, an unprecedented concert took place in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. A racially integrated, standing-room-only crowd filled the hall to spend three-and-a-half hours listening to a large cast of musical performers, all of whom were African-American. Nothing like the combination of an all-Black cast playing for an integrated audience had ever taken place in any major concert hall in North America. 

The concert that helped to eradicate the musical color line as nothing before was titled "From Spirituals to Swing" and subtitled "The Music Nobody Knows." Its cast included many performers who are now considered to be musical immortals, such as Count Basie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, Ruby Smith, Big Joe Turner, Big Bill Broonzy,  Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, Albert Ammons, Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis, Pete Johnson and James P. Johnson, but who were, at the time, totally unknown to white audiences. 

The event, which was an enormous success, would probably never have happened had it not been for the willingness of the Communist Party of America to put up the front money that made it possible. Not surprisingly From Spirituals got a rave review from the CP's weekly magazine, "New Masses," which made many excellent points, including this one: The concert "marked the close alliance between the music made in the everyday life of the Negro and the music which has come to be called swing ; it maintained an authenticity which served as a crushing indictment of commercial jazz with all its attendant chicanery and lack of sincerity; and finally, it proved that an instinctive love of music will break through the thickest fog of oppression, and with lightning speed and irrefutable argument, record that oppression."  https://www.local802afm.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Jacob-Goldberg.p…   

You Call This "Home Rule"?

50 YEARS AGO, on December 24, 1973, Congress gave up its dictatorial control of Washington, D.C., when Richard Nixon signed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which gave D.C. its first elected mayor and city council. But Congress -- a governing body that is overwhelmingly white -- stopped far short of allowing the citizens of D.C. -- the majority of whom are Black -- the power to govern themselves. In fact, under so-called "Home Rule" government, Congress controls D.C.'s budget and has veto power over all legislation passed by the city council. Also, the U.S. President appoints the District's judges, and the District has no voting representation in Congress, even though D.C. has a greater population than both Vermont and Wyoming, both of which send two Senators and one representative to Congress.

In the 50 years since the passage of the "Home Rule" Act, conservatives in Congress have repeatedly exercised veto power over laws adopted by the D.C. City Council. For example, in 1981, Congress struck down a D.C. law that would have decriminalized homosexual acts and adultery between consenting adults and lowered rape sentences from life to 20 years. In 1988, Congress blocked the D.C. Council's decision to use public funds to pay for abortion services and a law that would have required city employees to live in D.C. In 1998, Congress vetoed the result of a D.C. referendum in favor of legalizing medical marijuana. Earlier this year, Congress -- with President Biden’s support – blocked the D.C. Council’s criminal-code reform, which would have eliminated mandatory-minimum sentences. To add insult to injury, Congress is now considering the repeal of the 50-year-old "Home Rule" law. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/house-republica…
 

Freedom Now!
 
175 YEARS AGO, on December 25, 1848, Ellen and William Craft, having liberated themselves from enslavement in Georgia by an amazing and heroic ruse, arrived safely in Philadelphia, finally out of the reach of slave-catchers. The story of the Craft's successful flight to freedom is well worth reading at length, which you can do here https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/craft/craft.html, but this is the 100-word version: The Crafts were married and working for their enslavers in Macon, Georgia, some thousand miles by train and by steamship from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Twenty-two-year-old Ellen Craft was light-skinned enough to pass for white. She had the brilliant idea to disguise herself as a young man and travel openly to Philadelphia in the company of a man posing as her enslaved servant, who was actually her 24-year-old husband William. At the time it was common for enslavers to travel with an enslaved servant, but a slave-owning woman would almost never travel with a male enslaved person. Hence Ellen's decision to disguise herself as a man. Their perilous journey took five days. Here's a link to a detailed (but brief) version of the the heroic life and times of Ellen and William Craft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_and_William_Craft